The Circle by Dave Eggers

Surprised that I have never read anything by Eggers before. Loved visiting his "Pirate Store" at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, just around the corner from where my son lived.
Anyway, I also was surprised that I had not heard about this book earlier; I just found it on the shelf of the Library, read it's inside cover description and thought, "I have to read this book! So relevant to what I lived and do each day."

Mae Holland is hired to work at the Circle, the world's most powerful Internet company (think Google!). This is the opportunity of a lifetime. The description of the office reminded me of the Google offices in San Francisco where my nephew worked for a while.  At the Circle, users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing are linked up with a universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Mae is enthralled with the office, dorm rooms for those who work late, the parties that last through the night, the 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 the world--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.

Some of the book seemed predictable, but I never tired of reading it. And the end was a bit of a surprise for me.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

Louisa Clark is an ordinary British girl in an ordinary British family. She has a steady boyfriend, who she is clearly resigned to be with, but not madly in love with. Her life is quiet, rather dull and pedestrian.  She is content working in a cafe and does nothing to upset the quiet monotony of her life. Her family struggles financially, she has a less than wonderful relationship with her sister and she and Patrick (boyfriend) go out to pubs with friends.
She loses her cafe job when the owner decides to close up shop. Lou needs a job!
She is suggested for a job as an assistant to a quadriplegic. The pay is good and it's close to home. She won't have to do any of the "personal grooming," but rather, just keep him company and in good spirits. What a job that turns out to be.
The interesting part of this novel is captured in this passage from a NYTimes review by Liesl Schillinger:

Lou has never fully lived; Will has, but no longer can. In health, he had exhilarated in “crushing people in business deals.” He had scaled rock faces at Yosemite, swum in volcanic springs in Iceland, sampled warm croissants in the Marais and had his pick of glamorous, leggy girlfriends. After the accident, he can’t walk, can’t feed himself, can’t have sex. The only power he believes he retains is the power to end his life; and, as a man of action, he wants to exercise that power.  But in Lou, he discovers an unexpected outlet for his thwarted energies: teaching her how to exert her own autonomy. “You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are ‘not that sort of person,’ ” he scolds her. “You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

A lot of this book is predictable, for sure, but I read it quickly and it was entertaining.


The ending may surprise some readers. I liked the ending.