Reading 1001 discussion

A young woman gets her dream job working in an amazing modern technology/marketing company called the Circle. She works her way up through the company and eventually becomes one of the key players as the Circle realizes its true goals for ultimate expansion.
This is an interesting book, telling the story of a baby dystopia as it is just forming. Those of us who read a lot of dystopian sci-fi have some idea what the world might look like after this novel ends, but the characters for the most part believe they are really ushering in a brave new world that will be far better than anything humanity has seen before. A lot of the details of the Circle are familiar to most of us who use social media, too, so perhaps our real world may look more like the one in this story for 1001 List readers a decade from now.
I enjoyed this book and gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.

Rating: 4 stars


A dystopian novel about the dangers of social media and tracking. A young woman gets her dream job in a large internet corporation. She learns more and more about the company and how it operates as the story progresses. The story is unsettlingly believable, in that I can see society possibly heading in this direction in the future.

IMHO, I enjoyed this book, but despite that, I don't feel it merits its place on the list.

I'm listening to the audiobook of the sequel to The Circle now, The Every. It's really good so far. I'd not be surprised if it turned up on a future list.

This book was written to make the reader uncomfortable and in this it succeeded. In 2013, when the book was published, this allegorical harbinger of what would happen in the next 10 years to our assumptions about the internet and privacy issues was probably even more unsettling. However, in the last ten years some governments, such as China, do require you to use private company internet apps for some things such as covid travel certificates (on What'sApp). Every service you use and everything you purchase on-line is followed up with a survey. Anything less than a 10 or excellent is considered a flawed response...
I love David Eggers non-fiction books but I do have trouble with his fiction. He is driven to so thoroughly get his point across that he loses sight of the need for some three dimensional characters and an actual plot that may include a few events that the reader can not foresee.
This painting of the dystopian future is well sketched but it does not pull together for me as an actual book. Mae is too easily consumed and the interesting secondary characters who may actually question this Brave New World, we don't actually get to know. Lastly, the character Kalden, who is supposed to be a brilliant thinker, can not muster up even the thinnest argument against what is happening.
Another reader on GR said that it was both a 1 star book and a must read and I agree with that assessment (although I gave it 3 stars).

I have to agree with some of Gail's comments here: that it is a relevant and engaging premise, but the quality of the writing itself could be better. Which is too bad, because I often have the opposite gripe with the list (strong command of prose, unengaging story).

Unfortunately this book from 2013 has aged...a little too well. I find it kind of wild that a lot of surveillance state dystopias from the 80s and earlier assume government as the source, when it is turning out to be corporate and social media based. I have legitimately watched people go from saying "never use your own name and address on the internet" to hearing people say "it's suspicious when people don't use their own name on the internet, what are you hiding from everyone?".

I also agree about it being very uncomfortable but that being part of it. That scene where Mae gets peer pressured by all of the circle people into sharing everything was essentially my worst nightmare. I'm active here but I barely post anyplace else and I don't want to. Hell, I even lurked here for years before I posted. I don't get social anxiety in real life, but the idea of having an unseen and possibly infinite audience, having your info sold for corporate purposes (I know I've done enough for this probably to be true and I don't like it), or something being stored and resuscitated out of context or after you've felt differently just really skeeves me out. Unlike most people, I don't really have any secrets, and yet I still love my privacy. It's exhausting to always be performing socially, I like behaving unobserved without the thoughts of strangers weighing in.

And all of this contributes to the real terror behind the circle that has absolutely appeared and damaged our culture: the oppressive weight of implicit censorship, and the impossibility of total freedom (a theme I love, and also well explored by H(A)PPY). Bailey makes the (terrible) point that total transparency would instantly fix society but that depends on what the cultural consensus is, when he also states that nothing bad has come from people having more information he doesn't consider or bring up how both the holocaust and Japanese internment in Canada/the US were achievable through having data about people, or how police already have cams of them shooting innocent people and nothing happens yet a protestor was arrested because they tracked her shirt to an Etsy purchase. This system also takes away the opportunity for personal growth from being able to make mistakes without everyone watching and genuinely learning, instead of people just conforming based on fear. What about forging a good society based on compassion and decency?

It's insidious, it's happening, but I just wish it was explored more profoundly with better fleshed out characters as well. Anyway, rant over, lol.

I also agree with Diane saying the book was enjoyable but I don't know if I'd keep it on the list in terms of highest quality or most significant literature. I gave it 3 stars, but might go up as I sit with it.

I agree with the reviews above. It is a book with a topical theme, despite being written eleven years ago, but the characterisation is problematic and apart from one character being not whom the reader could surmise, the denouement was obvious for most of the book. More could have been made of the dissident, Mae's parents and even Annie, but the opportunity was ignored. I am not a fan of dystopian novels, so this has no doubt influenced my three star rating.

Reason read: botm January 2025, Reading 1001. This is a story in the not too distant future about the dangers of technology. Published in 2013, it is too real today. The story is about how technology makes everything known, transparent and the book shows how all this degrades our freedoms. This should be a wake-up call. No job should require you to have a social presence 24-7. Did COVID and the lockdown, kind of put a halt to some of this craziness. Or did people even though at home become more involved in social media and so called transparency?
I gave it 3 stars.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book I disliked as much. Eggers basically writes a series of lectures about the pros and cons of social media. People don’t TALK like this. The shark metaphor – please! So obvious and labored. The story was ludicrous and there isn’t a single believable or likeable character. As another GR reviewer noted, "Mae is so easily manipulated by the powers that be at the Circle that it is difficult to acknowledge her as a sentient being." Why would anyone publish this, and why would more people make a film adaptation?!?

If it was possible to give a book negative stars, that's what I would give it. Avoid at all costs.

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Mae Holland begs a job at the campus of the world's largest and most admired technology company and is overwhelmed by the change in her fortunes. The work is demanding, as is the social media input she's expected to make, but she soon starts triumphing over her rookie errors. Clearly she is heading for a fall, but it didn't take the slope I was expecting.

I put off reading this for a long time because I failed to appreciate A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I read this one as a kind of satire and enjoyed the ride. Clearly it's absurd in many respects, and Mae is hardly believable and a monster, but I found it entertaining and thought-provoking in the same way as a lot of other dystopian fiction.

I agree it's a surprising addition to the list - I wonder why they added it and if it will disappear if/when there is a new edition?

***

Granted, this was probably a bit prescient in 2013. The way things are currently unravelling in the US at the moment is in many ways similar to the cute endoctrination story of Mae Holland and her fellow Circlers, down to a few differences: 1- The Circle is an hypertrophied version of today's events, but the motivations are the same and the tech bro oligarchs have almost achieved the same thing in real life as in fiction; 2- the Americans in The Circle are way more stupid in numbers than the country which has returned a Temu dictator to power last November; still, it didn't require an overwhelming majority of people who drank the Kool Aid to achieve almost the same result as in The Circle: the tech bro oligarchs have now got the elected politicians by the nuts. From a literary perspective, The Circle is kind of a mixture of Fifty Shades of Grey and Who Moved My Cheese?, so not too difficult to read. If I want more substance, I'll go and grab Shoshona Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism or Binding Chaos by Heather Marsh. And I'll definitely not order these from Amazon. Oh, and fuck you Jeff Bezos.

I played the audiobook on a road trip and I thought the tech side of the book would appeal to my husband. This is a slow moving book with a lot of detail. We listened to the first 25% and we were still on Mae’s first day on the job. We gave up as a roadtrip read but I continued on myself to finish the book. I can see why this book is on the 1001 list as it foreshadowed some of the pitfalls of 'big tech'.