the circle

April 6, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Gladly Throw Into the Ocean

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week’s topic is books we would gladly throw into the ocean. I’m not big on the idea of book destruction, I’ll admit. Even if the book isn’t really my deal, I’m not usually ready to condemn it for all time. These ones, though…these ones tempt me.

American Psycho: Truly the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. It’s a razor-sharp satire and I appreciate Ellis’s talent, but honestly I don’t think anyone should read it.

The Circle: This book had the potential to say interesting things about social networking and the way it has changed the way people relate to each other…but instead it told a very simple story about people who are awful in deeply boring ways.

The Sisters Chase: I read this for my book club, and found it manipulative and profoundly unoriginal, but I DID enjoy the experience of ripping it apart in discussion.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: There are not words for how deeply and profoundly I loathed this book.

The Grapes of Wrath: If flat, two-dimensional characters, moralizing, and incredibly obvious metaphors are for you, you’ll love this! I read it for AP English and it still makes me angry that I wasted my time on it to this day.

Atlas Shrugged: One of the few books I’ve ever given up on, during the like 100-page monologue by John Galt. I’ve actually read the rest of Rand’s works and will argue that We The Living is actually pretty solid, but this book is just purely a piece of political propaganda.

Ask The Dust: That the author hated women was very obvious almost immediately, and I never really felt like there was a point to this story at all.

Crime and Punishment: Can you kill someone without feeling guilty? Spoiler alert: no. That’s the book.

The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway’s writing just generally don’t do it for me, but add in the relentless misogyny and it’s a big “no thanks” from me.

Don Quixote: I don’t love satire generally, but found this one in particular so very tiresome. It has like three jokes endlessly repeated over what felt like a billion pages.

June 5, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Shouldn’t Have Bothered Finishing

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! A few weeks ago, we talked about books we didn’t like but were glad we’d read anyways. The actual topic for this week are books we decided to stop reading too quickly. I almost never DNF (do/did not finish) my books, but there are some that if I’m being honest with myself, I should have because the book did nothing for me.

Where’d You Go Bernadette: I knew almost as soon as I started reading this that the tone was a mismatch for me. That never changed.

Bonfire of the Vanities: I’d previously read and hated Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I should have bailed when I started this and realized within like 50 pages I hated this too. Instead I read the whole thing and hated every second of it.

On Trails: I’ve actually got a pretty rocky history with the books my book club reads, but I love the group so much so I stick with it. This was last month’s read, and the scattered way the information was presented was something that annoyed me pretty quickly and then just never stopped annoying me. This is a minority opinion, though…my book club overwhelming liked it!

The Sisters Chase: This was another book club selection and holy smokes it was awful from the first page all the way to the last. This time everyone else in book club agreed.

Sophia of Silicon Valley: If you’re going to like this book, you have to really be rooting for the titular Sophia and given that I thought she was terrible from the jump…it did not work out well.

Vinegar Girl: The gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew are hard to update to the modern world, and the wit and snap that would make it work do not materialize. Skip this egregiously bad book and watch 10 Things I Hate About You.

The Witches of Eastwick: The movie version of this book is a cheesy 80s delight with some genius casting. The book, which I was surprised to find out was written by the legendary John Updike, was a dull, tortured plod and never got good.

The Circle: I was so excited for this book before I read it…a 1984 for the social media generation? Sign me up! But then it fell SO. FLAT. Lazy characterization, clunky dialogue, and the least interesting plot choices made. Though I’m always honest when asked for my opinions, it’s very rare I’ll actively discourage someone from reading a book. This is one of the few exceptions.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Two Eggers in a row…my practice with any given author is that if one book doesn’t work for me, it’s just as likely to be a weaker offering or just the wrong book at the wrong time as it is to be that I’ll never like that author. Two, though, and I give up. Why I made myself suffer through this simultaneously anxious and boring book before I wrote off Eggers for myself I can’t quite understand.

Dune: This space opera hits like 100% insanity right away and I do better when there’s a little more world-building first.

September 14, 2017

Book 94: The Circle

“Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.”

Dates read: September 27-30, 2016

Rating: 3/10

I don’t know about you, but a lot of my internet presence is tied to either my Google account or my Facebook account. It’s so hard to remember a million different passwords and logins when you can just authorize logging in through Facebook and not have to worry about it anymore. But we all know it’s not quite as innocuous as we’d like it to believe…we see the ads for that cute dress we looked at on our work computer show up on our home computer and know that we signed into the website selling that cute dress through Facebook. Technology and social media are awesome, but they’re also new. If we’re being honest, we don’t really understand the full ramifications of putting so much of our lives on the internet. We’re making a lot of it up as we go along.

In Dave Eggers’ The Circle, we’re ever-so-slightly in the future, and one large umbrella company has taken over most of what happens on the internet: all your social media and e-commerce goes through a TruYou profile, a product of The Circle. When Mae Holland, a recent graduate of an East Coast private liberal arts school who grew up in working class California, is able to get a job at The Circle through her friend Annie, she’s thrilled. The sprawling and luxurious Bay Area campus is beyond her wildest dreams and the company is at the forefront of every breaking new development in internet technology. She’s increasingly drawn into the world of The Circle as it encroaches further and further into formerly private arenas of life, and can’t understand her family and friends who resist the shifting landscape of the world.

Theoretically, this is a really good book, a modern 1984. When you hear about things like the lawsuit in Spain about the right to be forgotten, it really makes you think about how deeply the internet has enmeshed itself in our lives. The Circle illustrates how slippery the slope could be for it to completely invade all aspects of our existence…microchipping and GPS tracking children to prevent kidnapping, very small constantly streaming webcams to open up closed regimes, politicians livestreaming their professional duties to make government transparent. All of these things sound like they’re positive developments on the surface, but it creates a culture of constant surveillance.

Where the book fails, though, is the execution. Mae (short for Maebelline, which I thought was a nifty way to communicate what kind of people her parents were without having to spell anything out) is obviously meant to be an audience-insert character, like Twilight‘s Bella. But it doesn’t work here to the extent it works for Twilight…the characteristics Mae is given, ambition and a certain amount of selfishness, render her mostly unpleasant. She needs to be a compelling character to have us follow her down the proverbial rabbit hole, but she has no real personality. She seems close to her family in the beginning, but drafts away from them easily and without apparent regret. She has “relationships” with peers like Annie and her ex-boyfriend Mercer, but we’re not given any sense of history or any reason to believe that she’s actually emotionally connected to other people. The writing is clunky, with awkward phrasing all over the place. It’s extra disappointing because the ideas behind the book are there, and if it had been rendered better it could have been amazing. I understand why it flopped, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…do you ever take technology breaks?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wolf In The Attic

February 21, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved Less/More Than I Thought I Would

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: book that we loved more or less than we thought we would. I decided to divvy it up: five books I liked less than I would have thought, and five I liked more! Expectations are a tricky thing…a beloved author, or favorite topic, can get you thinking that you’ll really appreciate something going in, while genre preferences can give you an idea that you might not like it at all. Which is part of why I try to read broadly, because I’ve been both disappointed and unexpectedly delighted!

Less

Yes Please: I should have known better, because I’ve tended to find “comedian memoir in essays” to be very hit-and-miss. But I had high hopes for Amy Poehler’s book, because I really enjoy her on screen. Sadly, though, this one was MUCH more miss than hit for me.

The Marriage Plot: Jeffrey Eugenides is my favorite author, both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are incredible. But his most recent book, The Marriage Plot, was more interesting than enjoyable for me. There are some thought-provoking themes here, but it was wildly uneven.

Pride and Prejudice: I love most of Jane Austen’s work, but this, which seems to be most everyone’s favorite Austen, didn’t do it for me the way I was hoping. I found both Lizzie and Darcy pretty irritating, and while there are things to enjoy here, it didn’t do as much for me as her other books have.

The Circle: Dave Eggers’ novel is really interesting conceptually, with a Facebook-esque company drastically eroding the idea of privacy feeling very resonant in the modern world. But the writing is clunky and the characters are awful and I hated reading it.

The Catcher In The Rye: This is a book that I think you have to find at the right point in your life to connect with. For a budding adult, feeling lost and alienated from the world, this probably hits home hard. But for an actual adult (which is what I was when I read it), J.D. Salinger’s novel about a teenager’s existential crisis can be just deeply annoying.

Jane Eyre: I wouldn’t consider “gothic romance” a genre that I tend to super enjoy, and Mr. Rochester is kind of the worst, but Jane herself is an incredible heroine and I really loved the way she grew throughout the narrative.

The Rosie Project: I actually wouldn’t consider any time of romance my preferred genre, now that I think about it. But this story of an autistic professor looking for love and the so-wrong-she’s-right woman that turns up in his life and was funny and charming and sweet and I really liked reading it.

Blindness: I’d seen the relentlessly depressing movie version, so I can’t imagine what spurred me to take the source novel off the shelves at the local secondhand store, but I’m glad that I did. It’s a difficult book to read, both in subject matter and presentation, but it was really powerful and I had a hard time putting it down.

Lords of Discipline: As a woman raised in a three-person family that consisted of me, my mother, and my sister, I often struggle to connect with material that’s strongly rooted in masculinity. And what’s more masculine than an all-boys military academy? But this coming-of-age story is written beautifully by Pat Conroy and is rooted in a very human sympathy that will appeal to any reader.

Anna Karenina: Russian literature has a reputation for being boring and a dreadful slog. And while perhaps Dostoevsky might deserve that reputation, Leo Tolstoy does not. Anna Karenina is a the story of a woman trapped inside the strictures of a society that can’t and won’t allow her to live as she wants and even though it’s a million pages long I finished it in less than a week because I couldn’t put it down.

February 7, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish Didn’t Have Love Triangles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic are books we wish had more or less of…something. Love triangles can be well-executed (Anna Karenina and The Age of Innocence both come to mind), but often don’t add anything interesting or special to the story, rather padding it with extra drama that doesn’t serve the underlying narrative very well. Here are ten books I wish I could read again without the love triangle element.

The Hunger Games: This is the start of an amazing trilogy about a young woman who conquers tremendous odds to become to be both a freedom fighter and a symbol of the resistance. Her relationship with Peeta is built slowly and organically, but the silly love triangle with Gale? Not even remotely necessary.

New Moon: Bella and Edward have plenty of obstacles in their romance without the artificial hurdle of stupid Jacob. This is the book where he’s the most real as a third leg of the triangle, but mostly he’s just sulking in the corner. Laaaaaame.

Water for Elephants: I loved this book about a young man who finds himself traveling along with a circus and working with an elephant, but the love triangle with Marlena and Jacob and August? Doesn’t add that much to the story, really.

The Interestings: While Jules and Ethan have a connection (and Ethan has a crush) when they’re teenagers, I never understood why it persists past the point when Ethan marries Ash and they have children. Jules is happily coupled, Ethan is happily coupled…why the need to add the *~drama~* of a long-burning love triangle?

Gone With The Wind: Has anyone who’s ever read this book or seen the movie ever understood why Scarlett gets so hung up on Ashley?

The Circle: Every single person involved in the Mae-Francis-Kalden triangle sucks. Mae is a selfish asshole, Francis is the worst kind of “she friendzoned me” bro, and Kalden only ever wants to bang in weird places. There’s no tension here.

From Dead To Worse: Most of the love triangles that make up Sookie Stackhouse’s romantic life are well-rendered and entertaining, but Quinn is my least favorite of her partners and when it comes to either him or Eric Northman, it’s hardly even imaginable why she might consider the other side.

Return Of The King: This is less of a love triangle than an ill-advised crush, but the half-heartedness of Eowyn-Aragorn-Arwen is just

The Marriage Plot: Being in a relationship with someone with a serious mental health issue is a topic that doesn’t get explored very often, and Eugenides handles that issue really thoughtfully. But inserting Mitchell’s crush on Madeleine like it’s a viable spoiler to that romance? Falls totally flat.

Sophie’s Choice: While Sophie’s love affair with Nathan is a beautifully tragic, Stingo’s desperate crush on her leads to one of the single most cringeworthy scenes I’ve ever read and it just feels so pointless.

October 25, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Horrifying Books I’ve Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! With Halloween around the corner, it’s fright season. I enjoy a good pumpkin patch and seeing the neighborhood kiddos in their costumes, but actually scary things like haunted houses have never been for me (I don’t like corn mazes either because being lost makes me panicky). I don’t read much in the way of “horror”, but I do read things that creep/freak/wig me out more often than you’d think for someone so jumpy. Here are ten favorites:

Go Ask Alice: Huge caveat here- I thought this was horrifying when I first read it at like, 11. A young teenager tries drugs and before you know it’s she’s getting sexually abused and runs away from home (I think, I can’t really remember it very clearly) and it was supposed to be a true account of someone’s life. Even though I think of it as laughably overblown now, I somehow was surprised when I found out recently it was complete fiction written by someone who’s done a lot of these “scared straight” books.

The Stranger Beside Me: Ann Rule was a volunteer at a suicide hotline in Washington, and often worked the late shift beside a likeable young man named Ted. They became friendly, and sometimes spoke of what was then front-page news in Washington State: a series of murders of pretty young women. Ted, of course, was Ted Bundy…the serial killer who was committing all those murders. Realizing how little we actually know about other people is definitely frightening to consider.

In Cold Blood: The horror of this one comes from the sheer unpredictability of the gruesome murders of the Clutter family of Kansas, and Truman Capote’s rendering of how their murderers came to them. The Clutters were just sleeping in their beds, minding their own business, when their home was broken into and they were brutally slaughtered. That’s so scary to think about.

The Hot Zone: We’ve all heard, after the Ebola scares that happened fairly recently in America, about what that virus can do to you: bleeding out internally is not a pleasant way to go. But before those few cases that developed on American soil, there was another close brush with Ebola: an outbreak of a strain among imported monkeys just outside Washington, DC. Ebola-Reston turned out to be a version that didn’t infect humans, but how easy it would be for a pandemic to spread in our globally linked world freaks me out to think about.

Under The Banner of Heaven: This is not really a book about Mormonism (even though there’s a lot of interesting historical information in there), it’s a book about fundamentalist religion. As a lady person, the treatment of women is especially awful.

Devil In The Grove: You learn about Jim Crow-era injustices and violence and lynching and the profound mistreatments of African-Americans in school, but it’s sanitized. Reading this book, about four young men on trial in Florida for raping a white woman, doesn’t sanitize anything. The actual constant threat and terror of black existence in the South during Jim Crow is eye-opening and just gut-wrenching.

The Pianist: The Holocaust is flat-out horrifying. There aren’t words for it. Of the Holocaust memoirs I’ve read, this one’s elegant-but-unsparing prose hit me the hardest.

The Shining: I don’t read much traditional horror, hence this mostly-nonfiction list. But I love the Kubrick movie, and even though the original Stephen King book is almost entirely different, I love it too. Like most of the rest of this list, it’s mostly about the monster inside of a man (the malevolent hotel plays a role, too, but it’s Jack Torrance’s internal demons that are the root of the issue).

The Stepford Wives: I’ve tried to keep the politics to a minimum here on this blog (we’re here for books, after all), but I will never keep my passionate support for women’s rights, including rights to control our reproduction, to myself. This quick-read satire makes you wonder, particularly in this election cycle, what men really do want from women.

The Circle: I read this very recently, so there’s no review up yet, and it’s problematic in a lot of ways. But the picture it paints of a world in while we give up more and more privacy to the internet is really scary to consider, because the slipperiness of that slope is real.

September 27, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Fall TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I’m fairly certain that this post is meant to highlight books coming out this fall that are on our TBRs, but I’m going to take it super literally and talk about the books that are up next on my TBR list! Since I actually did a fairly similar topic recently, there’s actually a little crossover: the first two books are the same but if you missed that one, here they are again with eight more alongside!

The Circle: I’ve never read David Eggers, and this book about an internet company that grows to emcompass more and more parts of the lives of its users feels super relevant to today. This was a bit of a flop, and I’m curious whether I think that’s fair.

Sophie’s Choice: I’ve seen the movie so I’m spoiled on the “twist”, but I’m interested to read the source material. The book isn’t always better than the movie, so we’ll see how this one actually works.

The Mothers: This (and the following two) are ARCs…advance reader copies, for which I am owing a review. This one is an inter-generational story about mothers during three different periods of Australian history. I don’t read much Aussie lit and I’m curious to see how I like it.

The Life Of The World To Come: When your story is about a high-strung law student/lawyer, I tend to be game because that has been my actual life. This about the aforementioned lawyer-type, who feels like his life is over when his girlfriend leaves him and his work on a death penalty case that throws him even further off-balance.

Border Child: Some of the rhetoric surrounding immigration today makes my blood boil, but I do think that the underlying issue we’re wrestling with is an important and complex one. What gets left out all too often, though, is the remembrance that these are people we’re talking about. This is a story about a family that attempts to leave Mexico for the United States, but along the way the small daughter is lost and the parents return home…but years later, information about their missing child is revealed and they won’t stop at anything to find out the truth.

The Executioner’s Song: The death penalty has been a long and abiding interest of mine. When I was in law school, I took a course on it, did research on it for the professor that taught that course, and was in a death penalty focused clinic. This enormous (1000+ pages in my mass-market edition) non-fiction novel deals with a death penalty case in Utah and even though I’m sure it’s going to bog down my reading pace I’m stoked to get to it.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine: I’ve always wanted to read this, and that hasn’t changed even though it’s been well over half my lifetime since I’ve been to Mass. It’ll be a definite change of pace for me!

Invisible Man: With the goings-on recently, racial issues have been top-of-mind for me. This is a classic story about prejudice and the way we divide ourselves from our fellow humans and I’m really interested to get into it.

Paper Magician: This was a Kindle sale pickup…I don’t know if I just saw the cover enough that it wore me down, but I definitely bought it inexpensively. I tend to be drawn to fiction about magical worlds, so I’m interested, but if I’m being honest the reviews are mixed so my expectations aren’t particularly high.

Eleanor of Aquitaine: I read Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII a while back (review upcoming…my book backlog is crazy right now, y’all!) and loved it…she presents well-researched history in a very readable and enjoyable way. So now I need to read the rest of her books, and luckily for me she writes a lot about royalty: one of my favorite nonfiction subjects! This one is about a royal I don’t actually know as much about, so I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth in!

August 23, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That Have Been On Your Shelf (Or TBR) From Before You Started Blogging That You STILL Haven’t Read Yet

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! There are LOTS. Like, a couple hundred lots (one of the reasons I started blogging was to hold myself accountable for actually reading all these). So, I’m just going to list the next ten books (excluding ARCs, all of which I’ve gotten after I started blogging) that I’m scheduled to read. Yes, I have a reading schedule, and spreadsheets, and the whole deal. I’m a nerd like that.

Bel Canto: I actually had to Google the plot synopsis, because I didn’t honestly know anything about it. I’d just heard good things about the author, Ann Patchett, and the book for so long that I grabbed a secondhand copy and I’m looking forward to reading it!

Inamorata: This was one I scored from the Kindle First program quite some time ago. Reviews indicate that the writing is very good, but the rest of it not so much. Sometimes solid writing can salvage an otherwise mediocre book for me, so we’ll see.

Life Itself: I love movies (I used to watch a lot more of them before I started reading so much all the time) and whenever I see an older one, the first thing I do afterwards is go track down Roger Ebert’s review. He was so good at critiquing movies without being mean-spirited…unless, of course, they deserved his disdain, and then he let it rip. But his wit and insight made him a pleasure to read, and this is the biography he wrote as he was dying.

The Bridge of San Luis Ray: I like to read prizewinners, and this won a Pulitzer in 1928. It’s a fairly brief novel so I should be able to read it pretty quickly, which is always a bonus.

The Other Side of the River: I’m pretty sure I found this on a list of best non-fiction reads set in each state (Nevada’s was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, of course, which I could not be less interested in). This takes place on the west side of Michigan, where two towns divided by a river are also divided by race and class. When a young man dies and is found in the river, the tension between the two communities escalates dramatically.

The Professor and the Madman: Like any good book nerd, words are my jam (my favorite has long been “effervescent” but I could put together a top ten list without much trouble). This book is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and apparently is being made into a movie!

David and Goliath: I’ve somehow never read Malcolm Gladwell before but my husband got a copy of this book, so I figure it’s as good a place to start as any!

A History of the World in Six Glasses: Beverages are an important part of cultural experience, and Tom Standage’s book uses beer, wine, liquor, coffee, tea, and cola to tell the story of humanity from the Stone Age to today.

The Circle: I’ve never read David Eggers before either, and this book about an internet company that grows to emcompass more and more parts of the lives of its users feels super relevant to today. This was a bit of a flop, and I’m curious whether I think that’s fair.

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