The Circle by Dave Eggers

This is a self indulgent sort of book, miles too long, held together by a shallow but compelling story. It’s about Mae, a young graduate, who joins The Circle and rises to become their star employee. It details the way this organization, which merges Facebook and Google and Microsoft and all the other information gathering/social networking/programming/internet payment sites and groups that exist, stitches up a global monopoly of information. It’s Eggers’ pitch at 1984 really and you can see he’s had a wonderful time creating all sorts of information gathering and tracking possibilities, such as embedding chips in children to keep them safe, and using the power of the network to track down criminals on the run in under fifteen minutes. The funny thing is that all the programs seem appealing on the surface: politically correct and beneficial to society BUT underneath it all they remove people’s privacy so that in the end there are no private moments in their lives at all. The writing is typical Eggers, running off at the mouth, way way too long, but it flows. The development of the totalitarian state where information is everything, something which used to belong to the realms of scifi, now appears frighteningly close.

Harvest by Jim Crace

I’m not really convinced by this book, which was a Booker prize nominee I think. It’s very poetic but there is a lot of book to deal with not much story. It’s set in the times when the Enclosure Acts were occurring, and deals with a village that has been farming its owner’s land forever. A new owner arrives with plans for reorganizing and resettlement. At the same time, three strangers arrive to settle on the edge of the village and a series of crimes against the owner’s property occur. These three changes in the status quo combine to destroy the village. There is one person left who tells the tale. Mmmm, not sure really.

One Summer America 1927 by Bill Bryson

I read half this book. It is written in an easy entertaining style, as is always the case with the talented Mr Bryson, but halfway through I thought, I’m really, REALLY not interested in the subject matter. So what happened in 1927? Well, Charles Lindbergh made his famous non stop flight across the Atlantic. And the genius baseball player Babe Ruth came to prominence. Anybody who is remotely interested in either of those events will love this book. I’m not and I didn’t.