Book Review
Title: The Circle
Author: Dave Eggers
Published: 2013
Rating: 65/100
Review:
(Adapted From Goodreads)
| The Circle is a thought-provoking and cautionary tale about privacy issues that reads like it was written by my father, a man who is constantly saying that companies like Facebook and Google are ruining the very fabric of society. As someone who lives on social media, wears a FitBit 24/7 and is obsessed with tracking everything, The Circle (TC) made me momentarily feel like an idiot... and I think that was Dave's goal when he wrote TC. While reading I found myself questioning my usage of social media on a daily basis. I found myself asking 'What's the point of all this?', 'Does anyone really give a crap about what I ate for lunch?' and 'Should I be doing something else with my time?'. Did Eggers hit home enough to make me delete my Facebook account? No. Was TC powerful enough to make me tear off my FitBit and smash it against a wall? No. Will I stop being so "transparent"? No. However, Eggers definitely planted a seed in my mind that might grow and fester into something months, maybe years, from now. I really wanted to love TC and I appreciate what Eggers was trying to do, i.e. take 1984 and make it digestible for a new audience of millennials who take selfies and are obsessed with numbers... but it's hard to love a book when it's protagonist is a naive, boring, cowardly, empty and mindless shell of a person who appears to just nod and agree to everything. Mae Holland is a drone, and not the cool kind either. She is so frustrating you wish you could reach through the pages and choke the life out of her. Eggers spends way too much time in her head and it's a head that nobody wants to be in. Eggers should have given us insight into his more interesting characters: Annie, Kalden and Mercer. I just hope that when the movie comes out Emma Watson is able to do more with the Mae character and give her a few extra layers. Overall, TC was a good read and it did make me briefly reassess my life, but it's also instantly forgettable and you won't remember any of the character's names a week after reading it. Don't get me wrong, TC is an important book because of the crazy world we live in today, and I'm positive it'll make for a very interesting movie when James Ponsoldt finally finishes it, but it also felt very light. Eggers could have taken this incredible basis for a novel and dived way deeper with it. He could have taken it to depths so dark that it may have been successful in motivating me to start avoiding social media like the plague and actually caring more about my privacy settings. |
Anyone who thinks they might be a bit too dependent on social media and technology.
- Chris Gander
Comments
Post a Comment