What I read while away, Part I

After this long hiatus, I wanted to at least do one quick roundup post of some books I read while I was away. I’m not going to do reviews of all of them – instead I’m just going to mention a few that left an impression, favourable or unfavourable. I’m splitting this post into two parts.

Dave Eggers: The Circle (2013)

In the “unfavourable impression” camp, we have this dystopian novel by Dave Eggers. You can’t even begin to imagine the disappointment, and I’m honestly still not sure why I slugged through this. Maybe because deep down at heart I’m a hopeless optimist and was waiting for it to become less predictable and condescending right up until the end? This book basically sums up all hyperventilating opinion columns about the dangers of the Internet and lack of privacy in social media etc. It’s incredibly predictable: young impressionable girl goes to work for big tech company (The Circle), has episodes of “whoa shit, this is awesome” interspersed with episodes of “whoa shit, this is getting creepy”, however sort of fails to realise the creepiness and gets drawn in deeper and deeper… you get the idea. I’d hoped for something much more surprising.