The Circle
Dave Eggers, 2013
★ 3.43 from 236.6k ratings on Goodreads
Science fiction Literary fiction
Mae joins the world's most admired tech company, where total transparency is the mission, and discovers what being fully seen costs. A bright corporate surface slowly gives way to unease, with a satirical voice and a pace that tightens toward dread.
Feels like unease, dread and curiosity. About power, identity and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy near-future tech stories that turn privacy into suspense and satire into discomfort. Be prepared for flat characters and repetition, and for a long, predictable stretch before the ending.
Why read it
It gives you a sharp, uneasy look at transparency and social pressure, and asks what you trade for convenience and connection.
A page from the book
A company campus where even the paving stones issue commands.
They entered an elevator of glass, tinted faintly orange. Lights flickered on and Mae saw her name appear on the walls, along with her high school yearbook photo. Welcome Mae Holland. A sound, something like a gasp, left Mae’s throat. She hadn’t seen that photo in years, and had been happy for its absence. This must have been Annie’s doing, assaulting her with it again. The picture was indeed Mae—her wide mouth, her thin lips, her olive skin, her black hair, but in this photo, more so than in life, her high cheekbones gave her a look of severity, her brown eyes not smiling, only small and cold, ready for war. Since the photo—she was eighteen then, angry and unsure—Mae had gained much-needed weight, her face had softened and curves appeared, curves that brought the attention of men of myriad ages and motives. What readers say
Readers found the premise timely and unsettling, especially its privacy and social-media warnings, but many were frustrated by flat characters, repetition, and a predictable, overlong execution; some still found it engaging and provocative.
Dave Eggers.Eggers co-founded McSweeney's, the independent publisher, and 826 Valencia, a San Francisco writing center entered through a pirate-supply shop.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Circle for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy near-future tech stories that turn privacy into suspense and satire into discomfort. Be prepared for flat characters and repetition, and for a long, predictable stretch before the ending.
- What is The Circle like?
- A bright corporate surface slowly gives way to unease, with a satirical voice and a pace that tightens toward dread. Feels like unease, dread and curiosity. About power, identity and society.
- What should I read after The Circle?
- If you liked The Circle, try Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) and Disclosure (Michael Crichton).
A taste of the feed
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
A home you can't stop looking at, even though it hurts.
I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.
The Girl on the Train · Paula Hawkins
The founder who can’t imagine a life after the company.
“Nobody knows,” Sanders said. “Bob built the company from nothing, fifteen years ago. When he started, he was selling knockoff modems from Korea. Back when nobody knew what a modem was. Now the company’s got three buildings downtown, and big facilities in California, Texas, Ireland, and Malaysia. He builds fax modems the size of a dime, he markets fax and E-mail software, he’s gone into CD-ROMs, and he’s developed proprietary algorithms that should make him a leading provider in education markets for the next century. Bob’s come a long way from some guy hustling three hundred baud modems. I don’t know if he can give it up.”
Disclosure · Michael Crichton
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