This week, the New York Times Magazine printed an excerpt from Dave Eggers' new novel The Circle, a novel I recently gave up on. The Times excerpt is taken from the beginning of the book, which gave me pause on the first page for how clumsily the setting is established. (Look for it.) The Circle is set on a satirized, Google-like campus in California, and it's about a company that has established complete dominance over the web and is avidly working to erode lingering, retrograde notions of privacy. In a slightly embarrassing flight of hyperbole, the Wall Street Journal called it "a Jungle for our own times, a vivid, roaring dissent to the companies that have coaxed us to disgorge every thought and action onto the Web." (It is like these reviewers have literally never thought about the internet before.)

But I've had my fill of handwringing novels about the near-future—not because I can't bear to hear Facebook criticized, but because I don't like feeling talked down to by writers who act as though their own rejection of social media qualifies them to lecture the rest of us. I want to read a book about how technology is destroying our humanity that's written by someone who actually understands technology. You know: Like Upton Sinclair actually understood the meatpacking industry. (Where's Ellen Ullman at?)

I probably should've stuck with the book—it's one of those Important Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About—but even more than the subject matter, I found the writing distractingly clumsy, and there's a lotta books in the sea, you know? Like Best American Essays 2013, which comes out this week, edited by Portland's own Cheryl Strayed, and featuring essays from Portlanders like Brian Doyle, Kevin Sampsell, and Vanessa Veselka, alongside Zadie Smith and Alice Munro and those sorts of names. Or all the book recommendations I got yesterday on my dystopian portal of choice.