Getting Lost

Annie Ernaux's diary of a yearlong affair with a Russian diplomat is repetitive and, for all its reputation for brutal honesty, at times reticent. Ernaux does put herself out there, it is true. In fact she often makes herself look pitiful pining for this man and hanging on his every phone call. The writer in her believes that nothing that is not written ever happened, but sometimes things happen that don't merit writing down. This is a case where a novelization of this affair would have been interesting, but Ernaux's colossal self-regard would not have it.

Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff's book is billed as a look at the "escape fantasies" of billionaires, but it's more helpfully a dissection of how the mindset of "move fast and break things" is ruining the planet. Like Sarah Kendzior's book They Knew, Survival demonstrates how all of the grand plans that billionaires have to save the planet leave 99 percent of the population behind. In both books, the great unwashed are shown to be little more than a nuisance to these men. Rushkoff explains that rather than fixing things incrementally and with a sense of modesty, hyper-libertarian tech bros must all start from zero (throw everything out) and go exponentially beyond any rational solution to the problem. Rushkoff leaves the reader with an ominous warning: "We've never seen a society avoid fascism when it gets to this stage of economic inequality, or civilization avoid collapse when it has taxed its physical environment to this extent."