strange and random happenstance

Lakewood by Megan Giddings
Published by: Amistad
Publication Date: March 24th, 2020
Format: Kindle, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Lena doesn't know what to do. Her grandmother was barely keeping things together before her passing. Now that she's gone Lena has to be the head of the family. Her mother has been ill for years. $80,000 worth of tests proved that she's sick but they still don't know with what. She has headaches and seizures, and her brain sometime just doesn't want to work right. In order for her to get the care she needs they need money. So Lena makes a decision. Her degree in art history can wait. It's not like school is going anywhere. She will become the breadwinner in the family. The problem is the only real job offer she's had is to be a sexy mascot at a taco restaurant opening up, and that isn't exactly going to pay much. But then she gets an invitation in the mail to join a medical study supposedly on memory. She'd have to sign an NDA and understand no one would be allowed to know what she is really doing. They'd set it up to make it look like she is just doing normal office work and all her and her mother's medical bills would be covered. Plus, Lena could start building a nest egg for herself and her mother. First she has to complete a week long series of tests. They are harrowing. Lena doesn't remember much except lots of doctors and needles and talking. But at the end of the week she's a few thousand dollars richer and realizes that because of her position, if she's lucky enough to be offered a place in the study, she will take it with no hesitation. Which is how Lena ends up in the town of Lakewood. There she reports everyday to a normal office and is handed a sheet of paper that tells her what her day consisted of. This is a well fabricated lie about dirty microwaves and stolen yogurt. In reality she and her colleagues undergo various tests. At first they seem benign. But then the "secretary's" teeth all fall out and Lena is locked in a cabin for she doesn't know how long. And then it gets worse. Also, why are there no white participants? And what is happening on other floors? And what will happen to Lena's mother if she leaves? Or worse, if Lena doesn't survive the study? Only time will tell if the mysteries of Lakewood get revealed.

The thing I love about my book club is that we all have such drastically different tastes that I read books I would never pick up on my own. And no, we never read books that the internet would designate as "perfect for your book club." Have you ever noticed those books are just... well, I could see the older women in my mom's old book club reading them, but never me. We read speculative science fiction, biographies, mysteries, YA, we are all over the place. I have to admit that the last few picks prior to Lakewood were not my cup of tea. So I was hesitant going in but also hopeful that it would break the cycle of, what I deemed, schlock. Lakewood delivered. The book was sold as "part The Handmaid’s Tale, part The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." While I get the whole reason for comparing books to other books to get people to pick them up, it sometimes annoys me, and in this instance I think they sold Lakewood short, because this is The Circle meets Get Out with a dash of The Office and a final helping of Annihilation and Stranger Things. It's got EVERYTHING! There's this day to day grind of what horrors will happen to Lena today. What will happen while she plays at having an office job? There's this veneer of normalcy that made me think of The Circle. The fact that this could be all above board except for this feeling that something is lurking beneath the surface. And while Lakewood would have been good at anytime, I think that when it was released led people to appreciate it all the more because it resonated with what was happening in the world, from the pandemic to BLM. This country has a horrible history of how it has treated people of color, and specifically in regard to medical trials, seeing them as nothing more than lab rats. Just look to the television commercials targeting people of color to get vaccinated featuring Spike Lee and the Obamas. The reason these ads are even necessary is because they have EVERY REASON not to trust. Years and years of medical experimentation have made them rightly wary. This book shines a light right on that and on the fact that people will only pay attention once white people start getting hurt. Things need to change and I hope this book, besides being entertaining, will get people to actually think.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Annihilation, BLM, Book Club, Get Out, Going Gothic, Lakewood, Medical Trials, Megan Giddings, Racism, Stranger Things, The Circle, The Handmaid's Tale, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Office, Vaccine

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: March 6th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 404 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Elsie is being exiled to her husband's decrepit country estate, The Bridge. She feels like they are burying her along with her husband. A pregnant mermaid drowning in black crepe. That is all she is now, the vessel for her dead husband's heir. Her marriage to Rupert Bainbridge was meant to raise her above her station. No more work at the match factory where she and her brother Jolyon slaved away until Rupert bailed them out of a tight spot. Now she'd have an idyllic life of luxury where she would walk through the streets of Fayford giving her beneficence to her new tenants. Instead on arrival she is greeted by her husband's corpse laid out in the great hall, a paltry indoor staff of three she can't bear facing, and the new knowledge that the villagers view the house as cursed and won't even deign to work there let alone accept anything from her. In fact the only person who has come to view her husband's body is the local preacher, Mr. Underwood. So here Elsie will waste away with only Rupert's cousin Sarah for companionship and the occasional visit from Mr. Underwood. But then there are the noises in the night. A hissing sound the cook writes off as the cat, or perhaps a nasty nest of squirrels. Only when Elise finally enters the locked room from whence the sounds came she finds no squirrels.

There are two eyes looking at her. She thinks it's a painting but it's "as if someone had cut the figure out of a painting and mounted it on a plank of wood." Elsie is intrigued by the figure that oddly looks like her, whereas Sarah is taken by the two slim volumes next to the figure, the diary of her ancestor, Anne Bainbridge, who was the doyenne of The Bridge when King Charles I and his wife visited in 1635. As uncanny happenings increase after the finding of the figure, with rooms changing and shifting, figures multiplying and poses changing and eyes following the two volume diary of Anne Bainbridge might hold the answers. Because it was in 1635 that The Bridge got it's nasty reputation of losing it's heirs, leading it to be left abandoned for years and years on end. Elsie laments that her life is starting to read like a bad penny dreadful. Only is this really happening? Perhaps the answers that Sarah finds about Anne and her husband Josiah, and their daughter Hetta, their miracle child who unnerves the servants and is otherworldly, and the Bainbridge Diamonds, will stop whatever is currently happening at The Bridge. Because it was Anne who brought these "silent companions" into the house. A trompe l'oeil treat bought in Torbury St. Jude that was just the thing to please his majesty. Or perhaps Elise is mad. Left silent in a sanatorium after her experiences at The Bridge.

I have a friend Matt. We've often joked that we should do a podcast because we literally do not agree on anything. Any book I love he hates and vice versa. Therefore it came as a shock to both of us to discover we agreed completely on The Silent Companions. I don't know what stars aligned or what parallel universe we entered, but we came to a consensus; we both thought it should have been more. The silent companions themselves were lacking. I think this has a lot to do with whomever wrote the cover blurb. Shame on you! When Elise opens "a locked door, beyond which is a painted wooden figure - a silent companion - that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself" I know every single person reading that thinks wooden weeping angels. There is not a single person who thought that the silent companions were basically set flats. I'm sorry, but set flats aren't scary. No matter how much they "change" or "multiple," cut-outs dragging their wooden selves across now deeply grooved floors doesn't inspire any kind of chills going up and down my spine. In fact I found them bordering on laughable. I don't know if this is because I am inured to cut-outs due to the popularity of having a cut-out of an actor from your favorite TV just chilling about your house or because I worked in theater... but the fact of the matter is, I was underwhelmed. By it all. I was sold by the blurb and the reality came nowhere near that frisson of fear I had the first time I read the synopsis.

Reading this book around the same time I was watching the new Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House I realized there was one area in which this book succeeds which I think is vital to the success of any true book purporting to be Gothic, and that is Laura Purcell nailed the sense of place. She nailed The Bridge and because of that there is a lot that can be forgiven plot wise. In fact, as I discussed this book with my fellow book club members I posited that I think I could actually draw the blueprints for this house. If there's one thing that I hate it is when I read a book and I can't get a good sense of the surroundings. I need to ground the characters in their setting. This book took it to a new level. Not only did I have the sense of the house, the house became a central character to the book, which I think was necessary for the narrative. That is why I compare it to The Haunting of Hill House. While the buildings have supernatural elements and events, you can still know where everything is and therefore when it changes, even subtly, you know something "other" is going on. Thinking on this further, and tying it into the set-piece like nature of the companions themselves, I wonder if there's a theatrical aspect that this book is embracing. Everything laid out just so so when it goes off the rails, you know where you were supposed to be but aren't any longer.

Enough about what I liked, an aspect of the book that really annoyed me was that Laura Purcell has an elliptical storytelling style. She drops potential plot points and red herrings all along the path and maybe one or two are actually resolved. I know there are people who say, but that makes the book more realistic, not having everything tied up in a neat little bow. To them I say, that's why I read books! Because unlike in real life everything can have a resolution and you won't be grumbling about what exactly happened in the heroine's past. Because really, there is a lot of heavy-handed doom and gloom about what went on in Elsie's life prior to her marriage. Abuse allegations about her parents, the struggling match factory, and her relationship with her brother... and yet not a single one of these is dealt with. We don't even really get any sense as to why Rupert married her. And I think the event that then catalyzes the entire narrative of the story should at least be discussed don't you? What annoyed me most though is that the book drops hint after hint that Elsie's much younger brother, Jolyon Livingstone, was perhaps her son. It would explain the strain in her relationship with her parents, whether Jolyon was the product of incest, again strongly hinted at that would be firmly rooted in the Gothic, or whether they were just forced to raise their grandson as their son, it would explain a lot. But nope. Nothing whatsoever is elucidated and for a minute I thought the book could be completely written off.

But Laura Purcell finally delivered! It's amazing how the final few pages of a book can retroactively fix many of the issues you previously had. And yes, I'm looking at you The Circle. Sure, there are all these threads left dangling, but the most important, the crucial thread was picked up and given a tug. I was wonderfully surprised that one of the many plot points Laura Purcell set up actually paid off with a little twist at the end. And no, I am not going to spoil it for you because you'd be able to pick up the one important thread at the beginning and not follow all the ones that are cut short. Yet I will say that what I liked most about this twist was that it took several of the unnatural occurrences at The Bridge and put it on one character's shoulders. Everything weird and uncanny tied back to one character. What's more, this had the added benefit of tying the two timelines together. Often in books with two timelines so far apart, two hundred years here, authors tend to have the past inform the present but not really carry anything over of importance from the past. Here that's different, and I think that is what raised this book up to being a satisfying read while also firmly classifying it as Gothic. So while this might not have been everything I wanted it to be, it surprised me in the end because the author broke her pre-established patterns and gave us one satisfying answer.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Elliptical, Going Gothic, Gothic, Incest, Laura Purcell, Netflix, Sense of Place, The Circle, The Haunting of Hill House, The Silent Companions, The Weeping Angels, Theatre, Victorian

The Circle
Based on the book by Dave Eggers
Starring: Emma Watson, Ellar Coltrane, Glenne Headly, Bill Paxton, Karen Gillan, Nate Corddry, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Amie McCarthy Winn, Eve Gordon, Patton Oswalt, Smith Cho, Amir Talai, Elvy Yost, Ellen Wong, Poorna Jagannathan, Judy Reyes and Beck
Release Date: April 28th, 2017
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Mae's life isn't going well, her car breaking down and forcing her to call her ex Mercer to fix it is just the latest indignity. In fact her parents talk more about Mercer and all the help he's given around the house what with Mae's father having MS than they actually talk about Mae. But her luck is about to change. Her friend Annie has gotten her an interview at the groundbreaking tech company The Circle. Mae gets a job in Customer Experience, and it may not be the job to fulfill her fear of wasted potential, but it's where everyone starts at The Circle. Yet her start is rockier than most. She's not participating as much as the organization would like. She's not reaching out instead she's focusing inwards and escaping in a kayak whenever she can. Late one night after visiting her parents she snaps and takes a kayak out on the bay which she's "borrowed" from her regular rental place after they've closed. Ironically it's tech from The Circle that catches her malfeasance but also saves her life. She is brought before two of the three founders, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton who decide to not punish her but use her as an example. Make her the face of a new initiative. Mae is going transparent. Everything she does, every move she makes, can be watched by millions of people worldwide. Because sharing is caring and knowledge not shared is a crime. Yet as Mae is scaling to new heights in the company her friend Annie is spiraling downwards. Mae doesn't know the end game of The Circle or how transparency is another method of control blindly loving her fame. As she gets in deeper she will be forced to make hard decisions and witness horrors that could change everything. It's up to her to stop The Circle, but will she?

"They're Watching You!" With those simple, musical, almost whispered words while waiting for Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island in a darkened theater I was instantly sold on The Circle. Of course previews are designed specifically to get asses in seats so despite my love of the preview I waited for reviews and in the meantime picked up the book. For years I knew who Dave Eggers is, more for his founding of McSweeney's, the west coast's answer to The New Yorker, than for his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I'd never actually read his work. Ironically the book gave me more hope for the movie, until the abysmal reviews came in. I mean, 16% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes is one of the worst scores I've seen in recent years, but on the bright side I hear the film will do well at The Razzies. So there's always a silver lining. Going into this movie with low, in fact almost no expectations was interesting. Yes, I was still frustrated when they got something so right only to follow it up with such a colossal misinterpretation of the text, but those were things I was able to laugh off. Sometimes knowing you're watching a dud gives you freedom to enjoy it for what it is. That's not to say I didn't have major issues, I still have criticisms aplenty, they're just from a more zen place. A place where Emma Watson seemingly single-handedly destroyed a film with an otherwise near-perfect cast. But it can't all be blamed on her, oh wait, it can, because all the changes, the taking a dark satire and spinning it into a thriller, all of that seemed in service of making the character of Mae more in line with Watson's values than as she was written. Because Watson is someone who would never drink the Kool-Aid. Do the people who made this film know about Jonestown?  

So let's go into Emma Watson's Razzie worthy performance. I really can't think of anyone more miscast than Watson as Mae. Mae is ambitious, manipulative, sexual, clever, and instead here she is atonal, flat, passionless, sexless. Look at how they clothe her! She's wearing all these sweaters that fully cover her body so that not an inch of skin is visible. For years now I've had friends who hate Watson's acting. I've always been indifferent to her. She's not how I see Hermione, but then the movies aren't how I see the world of Harry Potter at all. She has a funny cameo in This Is the End, but The Bling Ring was so boring I have tried to excise it from my mind, as for Beauty and the Beast, we are not going there. But I do respect her and I do follow what she does, especially with regards to not just her stance on feminism but on reading as well. So the fact that she plays Mae as someone with no charisma, someone who literally NO ONE would follow isn't just baffling to me, it takes the punch out of the whole movie. I don't know if I can accurately state how bad she is. The lines she delivers feel as if she's reading them off cue cards and is being forced to do so and is therefore coming off as harassed and with just the whiff of pissed off teenager being forced to say hi to company. Was there even a director? Because ANY sensible person in charge should have been like, "Hey Emma, can we get some emoting or acting here? You are an actress right?" Mae is stripped bare, but not literally because God forbid Emma shows some skin, and made boring. When Annie tells Mae she's perfect, I had the biggest laugh. Annie, that's the speed talking! 

Yet the biggest changes that were wrought happen in the movie's climax. When Mae does a presentation on how Circle technology can be used to find anyone on earth things spiral out of control and her ex Mercer dies. This is true in both the movie and the book. Only in the book, a dark dystopian comedy, Mae is the instigator, she's egging the Circlers on. She's releasing drones like flying monkeys and that's the moment in the book when you realize that Mae is one of them. But here, oh no, the sexless Emma Watson couldn't be seen as causing someone's death. So instead she's pushing against hunting down Mercer. She's hemming and hawing and Tom Hanks as Eamon Bailey steps out and drives Mercer literally to his death. Um, WTF is this? Bailey is the papa bear of The Circle, if anything Patton Oswalt should have been behind this brutal manslaughter. This moment is the moment, for me, that the book gelled and also the moment when I realized Holllywood just didn't get it. James Ponsoldt, a director and writer whom I've never heard of aside from his David Foster Wallace movie which I'm now probably never going to watch, just didn't get it. The Circle isn't about a near miss, a disaster avoided, this is about a technological Utopia being thrust on us with forced adaption to this secretly totalitarian regime, not something with a happily ever after. And again, I don't know if this was to preserve the "nice" imagine that Watson has built up or because they thought the ending was too bleak. Here's the thing, the bleak ending is more real. The reason the book drew me in is because at the end Mae wasn't the savior, she was Judas!

Though Ty turns out to be the character most changed. In fact, I'm surprised they actually got John Boyega at all with how minimal the role is. In the book "Ty" is a mysterious stranger who Mae is drawn to and has relations with only to eventually find out he is one of the three founders of the company. Yes, I do admit that drawing out that reveal, even in the book, pushes credulity, but to go the opposite way and have him just as exposition and then a deus ex machina is a waste of his talents. While I wasn't all on the Boyega train to begin with I've seen him enough now to know that he is criminally wasted here. He actually has no point other than to fill the plot holes. Plus, can we talk about that hasty ending? You're not going to watch this film, trust me, you're not, so here are some spoilers, in fact all the spoilers. Mae turns against the company and in a lecture she's giving during the talk, thanks to Ty, all the "secret" correspondence of the other two founders is leaked. In the book this is actually what Ty WANTS Mae to do but as I've said before, she goes deliciously Judas and that's the end of Ty. Instead the data destroys the founders yet somehow The Circle survives and Mae's out kayaking... about the only thing they got right is Mae and that stupid kayak. I just don't get it. I mean, just why!?! This book was a bestseller and then you go and do all these tweaks and twists and add a HEA and you think you're going to get a blockbuster movie? That's not how things work. Create a good adaptation OR a good reinterpretation. Don't give us muck. Audiences don't like it, as Rotten Tomatoes has clearly shown.

But the most nonsensical thing to me is something that probably I and only other graphic designers would notice, and that's The Circle's logo. The Circle's logo as seen on the right hand of the image above is ubiquitous in the film and is just plain boring and derivative. Like Apple redoes The Criterion Collection's logo. You might be wondering why this would bother me so much, and the answer is Jessica Hische. Jessica Hische is an amazing designer noted for her typography skills. Seriously, check her out and you'll realize you've been loving her stuff for years without even knowing it. As she said about The Circle on her website: "After working with Dave Eggers on Hologram for the King I was pumped to be brought on board to design his new book, The Circle. It was especially fun to design this cover, as I’ve spent the last two years living in San Francisco surrounded by the tech industry (my husband works for Facebook) and the story is set in an influential social media company. I also had to design a logo for the fictitious company, The Circle, and was inspired by the interweaving connectivity of social media sites and also knots that once tight are difficult to untie." The logo she designed is perfection. I don't know if Eggers' description or her design came first but it captures what the book is about 100%. But should I be surprised that a movie would trash the work of a talented designer and start over with something bland and unoriginal when that is what they did with the whole narrative? I guess not. But I can still grumble about it.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, Dave Eggers, Desexualize, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Emma Watson, Graphic Designer, HEA, Jessica Hische, John Boyega, Jonestown, McSweeney's, Razzie, The Circle, The New Yorker, Tom Hanks, Tom Hiddleston

The Circle by Dave Eggers
Published by: Vintage Books
Publication Date: October 8th, 2013
Format: Paperback, 497 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Mae Holland had dreams that took her east of the Rockies to an elite liberal arts college yet here she is, back in her home town, working nine to five at a utility company of all places. Whereas her college roommate Annie Allerton doesn't just work for the most important tech company on the planet, she's one of the Group of 40, one of the forty most influential people in the most influential company in the world. Thanks to Annie pulling some strings she gets Mae in the door for an interview at The Circle. As Mae walks through the campus she realizes that she is in heaven and she doesn't care if the job she's interviewing for is only in Customer Experience, answering questions and obsessively keeping track of her satisfaction rating, it's where everyone started, even Annie. Yet her transition into The Circle isn't that smooth, she makes more than a few mistakes in not fully engaging in the culture that the company wants its employees to embrace. She also upsets a few of her coworkers by her lack of participation.

But leeway is given as she's a friend of Annie and there are extenuating circumstances with her family. Her father is suffering from MS and her mother is struggling to cope. With Mae now further away they are relying heavily on Mae's ex, Mercer. The pressure to help, to be better, makes Mae reckless and one night she breaks into a kayak rental store she frequents after-hours and what happens next changes everything. It's not just that Mae is caught by technology that The Circle created, it's her blind ignorance that she was cheating others of a once in a lifetime experience that now only exists in her memories. Because sharing is caring. This experience is the beginning of her full integration into The Circle. Through a talk with The Circle's co-founders, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton, Mae becomes "transparent," broadcasting her life 24/7 to the world. Soon she has eclipsed Annie and becomes the face of The Circle. Mae has everything she could possibly dream of, what could possibly go wrong?

The Circle is an interesting book to read because I think I can say that it's easily the most uneven book I've ever read with an ill-defined endgame. Because of my blog and how many books I review in a year I kind of get a sense while reading about what star rating a book will end up with but here I was flummoxed. The narrative is continually waffling between searing satire and heavy-handed often clumsy world commentary. If The Circle hadn't ended on just the right note that it did, with that perfect level of cynicism pushing it towards darkness, it would have been a fail. With literally one witch-hunt worthy of the Wicked Witch of the West and a two and a half page conclusion everything comes together and all the faults can be overlooked when you finally see the bigger picture. That ill defined bigger picture is so badly articulated until those final moments when you learn what the end goal of "closing the circle" is that The Circle is almost a book without a plot relying on vaguely interconnecting scenes and too much kayaking. While a book can be redeemed by it's ending, it's far more satisfying to have enough clues that give you a hint of what's to come without actually being able to put all the pieces together. Structure is important to all things in life, not just architecture!

What struck me most forcibly reading The Circle is how it resonates at the moment. This transparency of life is exactly the opposite to how we are currently living. The trolls of the Internet are everywhere, even in the highest office of the land, and they hide behind fake news and fake identities. Truth isn't actually something you hear very often anymore. Yet The Circle created TruYou, where your identity isn't just synced across all platforms, but that it's verified as actually being you, like Twitter verification to the umpteenth degree that has access to your credit cards. Everyone can be held accountable for everything they do. This is just such a weird polarity to living in a world where the president doesn't even want to be on camera for plausible deniability. And all this got me thinking, could what is happening now spawn a future like Dave Eggers has created? Will all these lies lead the coming younger generation, who are the early adapters of all tech, to force a TruYou situation? Which I personally think would be the other extreme. Just because it looks perfect doesn't mean it is, that's the whole point of dystopian literature, it's someones utopia.

And as we all know, utopia is heaven, and heaven is found through religion and the church, and oh yes, there are religious metaphors aplenty here. While the most obvious would be to see this as very much of the school of Scientology, I think it's more the school of Apple, or Google, or even, to go a little homegrown, Epic. All secretive organizations, all have vast sprawling campuses that encourage a community formed of your work colleagues, and all kind of indoctrinate you. Years ago a study was done on true Apple acolytes and under scientific observation they had the same reaction to seeing the Apple logo as true believers when show the cross. Eggers is on fire when he leans towards the dark humor. The book soars when comparing the three founders to the father, the son, and the holy ghost, or, as the case is here, an octopus, a shark, and a seahorse. Their inability to see who is the most dangerous of the three founders. The dark intents that "the son" has for the future. I just want to yell it from the rooftops that this is what works, this is what makes the book such an amazing read. But then Eggers comes along every once in awhile and goes all earnest and I want to smack him. Being earnest has no place in a dark satire, and those scenes when Mae is smiling or frowning at 50 million different "tweets" or posts while using so many screens it's almost incomprehensible I want to highlight them and ask Eggers to make the rest of the book like this.

Because whenever Mae has to deal with anything outside The Circle it's like a damp towel has been thrown over the book. Her off-campus life is painful to read. It's not just that there's no spark, no subversive humor, it's that it's too earnest. Mae dealing with her family and Mercer is painful. Yes, I know that this kind of needs to be the case. There needs to be a disconnect between her old world and her new world, but that doesn't mean it has to be so bleak. Her parents dealing with MS was almost too painful for me to read, and not just because I've spent this year suffering from caregivers syndrome, but because it didn't read true. It read as plot contrivances. We need Mae's parents to push her further into The Circle and Mercer to be the sacrifice that is the nail in Mae's coffin. But could they at least have been written better? This needed the polish that the rapid fire dialogues Mae has with her co-workers received. It just needed to be a piece with the rest of the book. THIS is what makes the book uneven. This disconnect between her two worlds, like trying to shove a FireWire cable into a USB port, and it needed to be addressed. As did Mae's love life, because Eggers sure doesn't know how to handle sex in a way that isn't clunky and unbelievable. But I'm willing to tackle one subject at a time.

For my final subject I will tackle tech. Technology is rapidly changing and each year that passes it speeds up more and more. By the time you buy a new phone or computer it's already obsolete. Just think about this, in my lifetime computers have gone from the size of large rooms to being able to be held in the palm of your hand and I'm not yet forty. And that computer in your hand is FAR more powerful than the one that took up a large room or perhaps even several buildings. Phones are now in our pockets instead of only in houses and on street corners. Therefore in the five years that have passed since The Circle was first released the leaps and bounds in tech have lead the amazing and revolutionary tech that Eamon Bailey introduces in his big presentation that Mae goes to laughably out of date. SeeChange, the streaming camera service that causes Mae so much grief but then makes her a celebrity is common now. When Bailey is talking about how crystal clear images can be I was thinking, yeah, just look at Netflix, or Hulu, or even Skype. This "revolutionary" tech is no longer so. Which makes me wonder about the longevity of The Circle. Will it somehow become a dystopian classic that looks back on a certain time with it's quaint tech or will it be forgotten? Personally, I think it will be forgotten. If you look at the classics of this genre there's a timelessness to them. While they may have been written in the 70s or the 80s they don't quite feel of that time but of all times. The Circle feels very much of one time and I fear it's time has already passed.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:01 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Annie Allerton, Apple, Dave Eggers, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Google, Holy Trinity, Kayaking, Mae Holland, Religion, Scientology, SeeChange, Technology, The Circle, The Wicked Witch, Timeless, Transparent, TruYou

If you're like me you're looking around the world and just thinking WTF. I mean, there's a reason The Handmaid's Tale won all the awards at the Emmys and it's not that it was a fabulous series. There was a reflection of the current state of civil liberties just going out the window. More and more it looks like we have become the backstory of a dystopian tale. So you'd think that reading other dystopian books would be antithesis to what we need at the moment, but you'd be wrong. There's something comforting in seeing that these visionary authors saw it coming. Also, there's that ray of hope that perhaps, if we pull together we can stop it before it's gone too far. We can stop it before Handmaids exist or before The Circle closes or just stop the Nazis, because seriously people, Nazis are never good and at least in this world we defeated them once before. These books give us insight into ourselves and the world around us and have become more and more relevant. Therefore I hope you'll spend some time with me reading a few dystopian classics and seeing what Hollywood made of them. It's time for some dystopian drama.   

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Civil Liberties, Dave Eggers, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Emmy, Handmaids, High Rise, J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Nazis, Philip K. Dick, Prophetic, The Circle, The Handmaid's Tale, The Man in the High Castle