53. The Circle - Dave Eggers

Audio read by Dion Graham

11 unabridged cds; 14 hours

2013 Random House Audio

491 pgs.

Adult CRF (I guess....)

Finished 11/25/2013

Goodreads Rating:  3.59

My Rating: It was okay (2) 

TPPL

Setting: Just outside San Francisco

1^st sentence/s:  "My God, Mae thought.  It's heaven.  The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands." 

Beginning Quote:  "There wasn't any limit, no boundary at all, to the future.  And it would be so a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness." -- John Steinbeck

My comments:  Well.  I'm not really sure what I thought of this book.  At times I was incredibly bored.  At other times I was incredibly pissed. Good books get strong reactions, but what is a good book?  Good plot?  Strong reaction to the plot?  Good characterization?  Beautiful words?  I think every reader has his/her own trigger, and this book helped me think about mine.  Story...a bit tedious, ending rushed.  Writing...okay, I guess. Strong characterization...lacking.  But does it make me think? You betcha!  I'll probably remember it for a long while.  But I can't say, for me, that it was a great book....  (Mae Holland is one of the most unlikeable protagonists I've "met" in a long time....)

Goodreads Review:  When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

49. A Guide For the Perplexed - Dara Horn

2013, W. W. Norton & Co.

336 pgs.(I stopped at pg. 168)

Adult CRF

Stopped reading on 11/8/2013

GoodreadsRating: 3.69

My Rating:  Didn’t like it (1)

TPPL

Setting: Massachusetts and Egypt (Cairo & Alexandria)

1^st paragraph:  "What happens to days that disappear?  The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held -- a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worires and triumphs and regrets -- all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room.  When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to do was open those gates."

My comments:  I've been wading through this book for over a week and am only half way through.  Last night, at my usual "reading time" I didn't want to read it, realizing I didn't like it at all.  I don't like the characters, I don't "get" the second time period that it keeps switching back to (it's boring) and I have absolutely no desire to discover what's going to happen. So why waste my time?  So sorry, Ms. Horn.....

Goodreads Review:  Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt’s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted—leaving Judith free to take over Josie’s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie’s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

A century earlier, another traveler arrives in Egypt: Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. Both he and Josie are haunted by the work of the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, a doctor and rationalist who sought to reconcile faith and science, destiny and free will. But what Schechter finds, as he tracks down the remnants of a thousand-year-old community’s once-vibrant life, will reveal the power and perils of what Josie’s ingenious work brings into being: a world where nothing is ever forgotten.

An engrossing adventure that intertwines stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the digital frontier, A Guide for the Perplexed is a novel of profound inner meaning and astonishing imagination.