3. The Circle

By Dave Eggers

As a thriller, it was pretty good.  I loved the backdrop of the vast Google-like corporate campus and its hierarchical hive of employees.

How the protagonist gets sucked into social media, earning points and climbing the ranks.  It was just when my own tech company had a new, youngish (under 50) CEO at the helm and was trying to rebrand itself, update its backend infrastructure, and modernize its corporate culture into one that encouraged (but not push) collaboration and extroversion. 

Even though I found the protagonist unlikable and unrelatable, I didn’t mind that fact, as the annoying naivete of her character suited the story, especially with what she did to her poor parents at the end, accidentally bursting in on them with her live camera.  That was brutal. 

Soon after finishing the book, I watched the competent movie adaptation on Netflix.  Even though I was given this book as a Xmas gift from my BIL, I didn’t like it enough to keep it, so I traded it at SW Welch.  Too bad, as Olman asked about it several months later, when he read about how it portrays life at a giant tech company.  You snooze, you lose.