This year’s stellar roster includes:

• Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
• RapGenius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam
• Digital magazine impresarios 29th Street Publishing
• Readmill founder Henrik Berggren
• Psychologist Jesse Bering, author of Why Is the Penis Shaped Liked That? and Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
• And more to be announced!

Set your calendars for Thursday, May 30th, 3:30-4:30pm at BEA’s Downtown Stage. (Facebook Event)

Hope to see you there!

I’ve been very fortunate to work with great publishing and technology companies for the past ten years. As I marketed bigger and bigger campaigns, one question persisted: How much value am I contributing? Book marketing resists quantifiable success metrics–perhaps due to the economics’ low-margins, or the field’s relative novelty in trade publishing. You’ll see quick hits and a few successes, but it remains difficult to discern if the work you’re doing is improving in the long-term. (Being asked to speak at conferences isn’t a yardstick.) Not to mention that publishers don’t reserve big R&D budgets; every dollar is stretched.

My solution? Get in early. Join a new press in its infancy and really test my skills.

In many ways I lucked out: Atavist Books is a wholly new company, founded by Barry Diller, Scott Rudin, and President and Publisher Frances Coady, whom I worked with at Macmillan. My old Penguin colleague Christian Smythe is steering operations.

As you can guess from the name, we’ve partnered with the Atavist for creating enhanced and static digital books. And print books are also very much a part of the plan, as is a lot of outreach to and dialogue with indie booksellers.

As you may know, the Atavist app was an early and successful entry in the longform space, marrying serious journalism with multimedia assets native to iOS devices. They’ve received a National Magazine Award nod and licensed their technology to institutions like TED and The Paris Review. (Friends may remember co-founder Evan Ratliff’s 7x20x21 presentation at Digital Book World in 2011.) If you’ve read an Atavist piece on an iPad you know how easy it is to disappear into the writing.

Atavist Books combines the very best of tech and publishing and will have a relatively small list with a strong emphasis of publicity and marketing.

Friends have asked the usual questions: when are the books coming out? Who are the authors? Is there a ping pong table in your office? For now I can only say: you’ll find out soon enough. I can confirm the ping pong.

I’d first drafted this post around the theme of risk taking. I’d still like to share my favorite passage on the subject from Nicholson Baker’s “Art of Fiction” interview in The Paris Review.

I had a job doing technical writing, which was really consuming me. I wasn’t sleeping. So my wife and I figured out that we could live for six months, mostly with the money she had saved up. I quit the job and wrote as hard as I’ve ever written. I would get up at eight in the morning and write until seven at night.

My wife was working two days a week, so I would take care of our daughter, Alice, on those days, and she took care of Alice on the other days.

The book he produced? The Mezzanine, an experimental novella about a guy on an escalator. (It’s great, by the way. Read it.)

If Shane Carruth’s debut “Primer” was left brain–all math, time travel, and nested Venn diagrams of causality–then his new film “Upstream Color” is right brain. The style is still very elliptical, employing a severe cinematic shorthand (more on that in a second), but the data points of its story find cohesion through emotional resonances and connections just under the surface of language. In other words, it’s romantic sci-fi.

The film is best viewed without knowing any of the story–and recapping it here wouldn’t convey any of the film’s magic–so don’t worry about spoilers. I would urge you to see it however you can, immediately.

“Primer” is famously complex, demanding and rewarding multiple viewings like some abstruse bit of analytic philosophy. The new film is much more straightforward. Which isn’t to say it’s easy. Carruth has perfected a grammar of film that feels very modern, very “2013.” Entertainment Weekly once praised “The Usual Suspects” as a great film for the DVD age because it rewarded multiple home viewings; “Primer” and “Upstream Color” are great films for the internet age: they beg for online exegesis and annotated wikis.

Many critics have noted Carruth’s confidence in his audience to follow his films down their opaque paths. While that’s certainly true, Carruth isn’t a dictatorial filmmaker like late Godard. He’s completely subsumed the history of cinema and put it to use with much more economy than we’re used to (i.e. maximalist directors like Tarantino and Xavier Dolan).

Take for example the couple’s meet-cute. Carruth knows we’ve seen a million of those, and they’re honestly a bit boring, so why not just jump 10min ahead, to the middle of their first conversation? Or, in a scene echoing Manhattan, the couple invents backstories for passersby as a means of bonding–the audience understands the function of this conceit as soon as it begins, and Carruth knows this, so he moves forward as soon as it’s proven its effectiveness.

Put differently: every other film shows us something two or three times to indicate pattern and repetition. “Upstream Color”  knows you only have to do it once.

This is key. In a post-screening Q&A at the IFC Center, Carruth called the film a “cycle,” and it’s a useful framework for understanding its architecture.  I’m not giving anything away when I say the audience knows much more than the characters. We alone witness the cycle’s beginning, maturation, and death. We know it may repeat in another town, with another set of characters, and another set of eerie resonances. It doesn’t need to be made explicit, especially when what has been made explicit–a film drunk on ideas, ambition, and aesthetics–is enough for us to know we’re in the hands of a master filmmaker.

The tl;dr version  of Wensink’s piece:

This past summer, my novel, “Broken Piano for President,” shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me! My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different “50 Shades of Grey” and “Gone Girl.” It was selling more copies than “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants.” So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.

Much as the word “publishing” has become a much-abused catchall for a variety of connotations, “bestseller” here must be taken with several grains of salt. Wensink’s referring to Amazon’s bestseller list, which is updated hourly, and not the more commonly cited New York Times list, which is updated weekly.

So, yes: Wensink can say his book legitimately outsold titles like Bossypants . . . for a one-hour period on one retailer’s site. (He writes that it shot to the top of the list for a week, which I would dispute.) Broken Piano sold around 4,000 copies throughout its run. That’s about what he would have to sell in one week to crack the Times fiction list.*

What’s most troubling is that a year after Broken Piano‘s publication Wensink still believes the most pervasive fallacy in publishing: attention=sales. His novel didn’t make NPR based on merit. Rather, he’d run afoul of fair use issues for IP owned by a $3.5B spirits conglomerate and made hay with the subsequent wrist-slap. Would you want to read a novel that was more well-known for its cover art than its content?

I know, I know: any publicity is good publicity. I’ll certainly grant that. And it’s understandable the same naivete that fueled the original news item–”Nobody will care if I rip off the logo of an internationally known brand”–would presume a brief Amazon sales spike portends a financial windfall. The difference is Gone Girl‘s publicity was actually about the book itself, not some Boing Boing-friendly legal skirmish. (Unless Wensink’s goal all along was to be talked about more than read. In which case: kudos.)

Of course, Wensink isn’t stupid. He knows when he says “bestseller” it doesn’t mean what everyone else thinks when they hear “bestseller.” There are no books with “Amazon Bestseller” stamped across the cover. The article itself only exists as a kind of Diet Disruption. That is, the Broken Piano story isn’t a case study of how the industry is changing–for that, see Laura Miller’s article on Hugh Howey’s “Wool” series. Wensink’s book an exception to the rule that proves…nothing, really. It’s merely a fluke. And as publishers well know, there’s nothing novel about flukes.

*But what about gaming the system? Amazon takes measures to subtract bulk buys from its bestseller tally. If you were to buy 500 copies of your own book, for instance, Amazon would flag the sale and remove it from the Sales Rank counts. So I’m told. As for the Times, there are numerous agencies whose sole purpose is to circumvent roadblocks and help authors buy their way onto the list. It’s a terrible practice which undermines the entire endeavor, erodes  consumer confidence, and wreaks havoc on booksellers’ buy-in from the publisher.

So I’m asking you, dear reader, to help me win a modicum of respect in the office by voting up my Thomas Pynchon entry for the Best Animated Video. It was produced by the great minds at Pentagram, and it happens to feature prose from one of the greatest living writers on the planet.

(You don’t have to vote in every category, just Best Animated Video.)

That’s right, it’s the fabled Tournament of Champions edition of New York’s best infrequent literary trivia night. Next Thursday at the great Housing Works Bookstore, three winning teams will square off to claim true Nerd Jeopardy honor and respect. (Plus a fourth team of amateurs*, just to embarrass them.) The questions will be more difficult–some in French, even–and I expect a level of fierce competitiveness rarely seen outside an episode of “The Bachelor.”

There will be plenty of wine and beer to keep audience heckling at a fever pitch and several opportunities for audience members to win prizes of their own.

FAQ

Q. I’ve never been to Nerd Jeopardy before. What’s it like?

A. Good question! Imagine the “Jeopardy!” game show, except all of the questions are about books, there’s free booze, and Alex Trebek uses curse words. Plus the audience gets to participate.

Q. But I don’t read books.

A. You’re an idiot. Stay away from Nerd Jeopardy.

Q. Just kidding! I have a master’s degree in Italian Renaissance poetry.

A. Excellent! You will feel richly rewarded for your responsible life decisions when yelling “Who is Boccaccio?” after a few glasses of wine.

Q. Is there a Facebook event? I don’t attend things unless there’s a Facebook event.

Enjoy.

Q. Did you see last week’s episode of “Girls”? Holy shit, right?

A. I’m an episode behind, sorry.

See you next Thursday at Housing Works!

*Want to compete? Grab two friends and drop your team name in the hat at the podium. I’ll pick a team at random around 7:10pm. 

If you’ve seen Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2012, the following list will be pretty familiar. What can I say? I’m predictable. Here are the records and songs I most enjoyed in the past twelve months. (Handily collected into a Spotify playlist.)

Favorite Records:

This felt like a very strong year for music, or at least the music I listen to. I became borderline obsessed with new releases by Frank Ocean and Tennis, while others hummed along in my playlist for months and months.

In no particular order:

• Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
• Wild Nothing, Nocturne
• Hospitality, Hospitality
• The Vaccines, Come of Age
• Dean Deacon, America
• Twin Shadow, Confess
• The Walkmen, Heaven
• Tennis, Young & Old
• TNGHT, TNGHT
• Chromatics, Kill for Love
• Japandroids, Celebration Rock
• The Weeknd, Trilogy

Favorite Songs:

Some of these are culled from the albums above, while others are standout tracks that will always remind me of 2012. Here’s a Soundcloud set of most of ‘em:

Solange, “Losing You” – From the first ten seconds you know this is a classic. My only regret is hearing it in November–too late for Song of the Summer.

Hospitality, “Betty Wang” – A pure pop celebration of female friendship. Where Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill” is the girls who smoke in the bathroom, “Betty Wang” is the girls in debate club (and their Japanese exchange student).

The Dirty Projectors, “About to Die” – Weirdness pays off! I was always pretty ambivalent about this band, despite the critics’ hosannas. It took a beautiful twenty minute art film for me to finally pay attention:

Death Grips, “I’ve Seen Footage” – The Money Store is a bit of a mess, which some see as a virtue. I think it could use more editing. But everything comes together in “I’ve Seen Footage.” It sounds like an original composition remixing itself into an angry Möbius Strip.

TNGHT, “Higher Ground” – Ostensibly a track for artists to rap over, I can’t imagine anyone improving this club destroyer. Imagine Voltron in a dance off with a Brooklyn flex crew.

Chromatics, “Kill for Love” - These guys have been perfecting this sound for years; finally the world caught up with them. Perfect for night drives in your 1980s-era Porsche 911.

The Vaccines, “No Hope” – It’s amazing how the Brits can continually spit out great rock bands five decades on. Just the right amount of punk sneer and Blur-era wit.

The Walkmen, “Dreamboat”  – The Walkmen, much like Spoon, keep stripping their albums down to find the sparest, cleanest music possible. Notice how the song fades in and fades out on the same guitar line? It’s as if Hamilton Leithauser is forever pining for the girl he’s wronged, and we’ve just gotten a (beautiful) glimpse of his regret.

Twin Shadow, “Run My Heart” - Prince lives in Williamsburg!

Tennis, “Origins” - Given the sleepy maritime sounds of Tennis’s first record, I was blown away by the 60s soul diva turn on Young & Old, nowhere more evident than in “Origins.”

Lana Del Rey, “Blue Jeans” – The hype around this album was a bit absurd and overshadowed the handful of great tunes. I don’t care if it’s all a put-on. This is a great song. (Also “Video Games.”)

The Magnetic Fields, “Andrew In Drag” – How many years has it been since 69 Love Songs? Stephin Merritt’s still got it.

Frank Ocean, “Lost” - Considering the song starts with “Double Ds/ Big, full breasts on my baby,” it’s a remarkably heartfelt song. I think this was my most-played track of 2012 in iTunes. (Also “Thinking About You.” Also “Pyramids.” Also “Sweet Life.”)

Jack White, “Sixteen Saltines” – You can almost imagine the narrator’s teenage crush hearing the funk/rock barnburner she’s inspired and thinking, sure, I’ll make out with him.

How to Dress Well, “& It Was U” - The song starts with fingersnapping in the alley, progresses to sidewalk crooning, some block-party shimmy, and climaxes in a city-wide boogie. Perfect.

Grimes, “Oblivion” – This is why art schools exist! A tiny Canadian lets her freak flag fly and manages to discover new corners of the dance/pop/electronic landscape.

Dan Deacon, “Lots” – While this record is best enjoyed as a whole, I might as well highlight this little Dan Deacon gem. It’s the sound of running through Times Square with all your friends. There’s confetti, too. Truckloads of confetti.

Japandroids, “The House That Heaven Built” – I was always thought “Eye of the Tiger” was jock rock bullshit. Now I get it, thanks to “The House That Heaven Built.” If this played in my helmet, every swing of the bat would be a grand slam.

Jens Lekman, “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love” - “And it’s bigger than the stock market/ Than the loose change in your pocket/ And the Flatbush Avenue Target/ And their pharmacy department” Thanks for putting things in perspective, Jens.

METZ, “Headache” - Remember in the Wicker Man remake where Nic Cage yells “Not the Bees! Not the Bees! They’re in my eyes! Ahhhhh!“? This is the musical equivalent of that scene.

Danny Brown, “Grown Up” – Maybe it’s the great music video. Maybe it’s Brown’s charm and charisma. Whatever the reason, “Grown Up” is the sound of hip hop nostalgia, perfectly executed.

Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” has become that rare work of art beloved by both critics and museum-goers. Though “museum-goer” might not be the right word, since “The Clock” draws crowds out of proportion for a 24-hour long piece of video art.

It’s been debated by art critics and film critics (sometimes simultaneously), and the New Yorker‘s dissected it from every possible angle. (Exhibits A, B, C, and D.)

I’ve seen five hours of “The Clock” so far. I plan on watching several more when it returns to New York  (at MoMA from Dec. 21 to Jan. 21). I thought this would be a good time to share a few impressions from the last go-round.

The “Maker” Theory: A twenty-four hour collage of cinematic depictions of time doubles as a utilitarian piece of art–it is indeed a functioning clock. Viewers always know the time, and an intrepid designer could turn this giant Rube Goldberg device into a wrist-watch with an iPod-mini-size video display. Whatever the arguments about the “usefulness” of art, this one skirts ‘em, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Cloud Atlas on Crack: There are those mainstream entertainments like Cloud Atlas and Todd Solondz’s Palindromes which cast multiple actors in the same roles (or vice versa). You could imagine “The Clock” as a ramped-up version of this idea with hundreds of actors playing a handful of characters. They’re obsessed with time, hitting the snooze button, running late for appointments, nervously eyeing a ticking time bomb’s countdown.

As Anti-Cinema: In a commercial film, when two characters speak in a diner, you might have a medium-wide shot in profile plus a close-up on each character. After watching “The Clock” for an hour, this setup looks simultaneously radical and archaic. Marclay’s assemblage continually frustrates the narrativizing instinct we’ve been trained to accept by thousands of Hollywood movies. We see a time bomb programmed but never detonated (or diffused), we witness duels and Mexican standoffs without the pleasure of setup or conclusion. We watch tearful train-station farewells without context. To paraphrase Shaw, “The Clock” is a series of guns appearing in the first act that never, ever go off.

The Director’s Commentary: There are several cheeky references to “The Clock” in “The Clock.” A museumgoer remarks of an offscreen painting: “I like it. It’s complicated, but it’s also simple.” Lucas Haas tells Sidney Poitier he wants to build a perpetual clock that can run for 100 years without delay or error; the impracticality and ambition of such an endeavor shouldn’t preclude its construction. You have to love an artist with a sense of humor, and I wonder how much this humor contributes to the piece’s effectiveness.

As Social Anthropology: By indexing the common behaviors of the human race (or at least, the first world) at different times of day, “The Clock” bears witness to a kind of cinematic sociology, a more nuanced and intelligent articulation of similar ideas in Koyaanisqatsi: at 9am there’s a flutter of students silently scribbling in their exam notebooks; at 5pm, phalanxes of office workers close shop for the day and head home. (At noon, a lot of us shoot each other in the street.)

It helps that science fiction and animation is largely absent. The clips are instantly recognizable as drawn from our world. And certain repeated activities reveal generational differences. At 8:15am, characters from 1940s and 1950s films complain about sleeping in; we hear the same lament an hour later from 1970s and 1980s. A contemporary Julia Roberts is very upset she slept until 12:15pm.

This Time With Feeling: By amassing material from commercial film (instead of, say, YouTube), every clip on view has been deemed worthy of a mass audience. Though it’s an imprecise and arguably dubious metric, it’s worth noting that everything we see has been determined by someone as the best take, in addition to the the requisite man hours of postproduction (color-correction, musical scoring). Even when the activity onscreen is incredibly banal–winding a clock, getting dressed–it’s performed by professional actors and movie stars on expensive sets. (The breadth of décor alone is Pinterest come to life.)

In this way every minute of “The Clock” is a more exciting version of that same minute we’re experiencing in real-time. And I would argue this isn’t the familiar escapism of cinema as it’s usually defined, because it never ends. There’s no climax, no resolution. Rather there’s an aggregate effect from these minutes and hours, a sense of spectacle many of us thought had dissipated from our image-saturated culture and its ever-higher bar for visual wonder. (In music, we have Girl Talk: not just a mashup of party music, it’s the best party music record of all time. Where do you go from there?) Might this be what audiences felt in the early days of cinema? Before the conventions of the medium had been set and repeated ad nauseum?

Afterwards, Walking Around the City: Its real-time aspect creates a temporal afterglow after a long viewing session. In other words, “The Clock” infiltrates the real world: every clock you see transports you back inside the artwork. Or to put it differently, the demarcation between art and reality is blurred, with elements borrowed from one another. You feel as though you’re living through Marclay Time. And, in a way, of course you are, as long as you live by the 24-hour clock.

DeLillo: If “24 Hour Psycho” inspired Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, I can only marvel at what literature he might spin from “The Clock.”

You Can’t Watch All of It: One could watch all 24 hours in a row, though this is surely not Marclay’s intention; his instructions that it’s best viewed on generic (uncomfortable) Ikea couches seems to reinforce this. The audience cannot “totalize” the piece, just as we cannot totalize “24 Hour Psycho,” or John Cage’s “Organ/ASLSP.” The piece is bigger than us. (Also: do those brave souls who’ve sat through all of it “know” anything more than more casual viewers?)

In this way “The Clock” reflects the rhizomatic culture of the internet. There are facile connections between millions of nodes–sometimes wonderful, sometimes maddening–and evaluating it as a formalist is a fool’s errand. It’s best to stop resisting and let the images, connections, fillips,  and the spectacle wash over you.

Song analysis on The Infinite Jukebox

Paul Lamere’s Infinite Jukebox, the product of a recent music-focused hackathon at M.I.T., is a lightweight tool which analyzes a song’s beat signature (and other components too musicologically or mathematically beyond me) and replicates patterns in its structure ad nauseum. Presto! A never-ending pop song.

Certain songs work better than others, of course. Users have uploaded the usual suspects from the Top 40 – Adele, Carly Rae Jepsen, Psy. Other songs function as a commentary on the tool itself. Gorillaz’s “Feel Good, Inc.” in its original duration is a tropical pop confection. In the Infinite Jukebox it becomes a manic assertion of positivity with a growing subtext of desperation, a soundtrack for two cocaine addicts’ 3am bickering. Less dark, and with more of a wink, is Radiohead’s “15 Step.” There’s humor in listening to a song about finality and sequencing this way: “First you reel me out and then you cut the string,” “Facts for whatever / Fifteen steps / Then a sheer drop,” and, in a coup de grâce, “Et cetera, et cetera…”

While this tool is good news for high school prom DJs, who can now deliver a 60min loop of “Call Me Maybe,” the Infinite Jukebox raises interesting questions about its distributive mechanism and place of birth: the internet.

The Infinite Jukebox doesn’t merely repeat the song once it ends, but rearranges the orchestration’s complementary components into a roughly seamless stream. If you know the song well, you’ll spot easily the verses and lines identified as outliers and promptly subtracted; similarly, there’s great fun in hearing the logic at work, laser-cutting puzzle pieces to fit. This works primarily because pop music follows the same pattern laid down by the Beatles and the Beach Boys. (I wouldn’t recommend listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” this way.)

I know what you’re thinking. Is this nothing more than a new way to ruin your favorite song? A song without end is no longer really a song, it’s atmosphere, it’s mood, and, given enough time, it’s torture. Songwriters and composers create work knowing the piece will end. (A few John Cage pieces being the exception.) After all, the work must end, it’s an unquestioned prerequisite and defining characteristic. How do you emphasize a refrain if it’s but one of ten, twenty, or two hundred?

This is not dissimilar from the philosophical conundrum of immortality, in which life’s end reflexively gives meaning to all that precedes it. I’ve often wondered why vampires in literature even bother befriending mortals, since a 25yr old would appear painfully immature to a someone who’s been reading books and having adventures since the Renaissance. I imagine it’s like debating Kurosawa with a toddler.

While the Infinite Jukebox is a something of a lark and probably not worth too much bloggy exegesis–I’m joking, everything online is worthy of bloggy exegesis–there are other digital projects which similarly favor never-ending narrativity.

The Twitter Fiction Festival, which ran from Nov. 28th to Dec. 2nd, highlighted experimentation on the platform with 29 “showcase” stories. These greatly benefitted from that crucial five-day window within which authors could tell their stories, setting down the rules of the game for readers.

For example, Scott Hutchins‘ “The Nanny” is a noir tweeted in 60min. episodes  once a day for five days. Someone following along can measure the suspense by how close to the ending they might be. While the festival has been successful, generating a bit of coverage and innovative uses of the platform, it also highlights how difficult it is to write fiction on Twitter. There are popular historical accounts told in real-time, such as @JFK1962 and @RealTimeWWII. These work because the creator and audience both know the story will end. (What’s more, they of course know the ending already. This doesn’t preclude enjoyment.)

Elsewhere, experiments in narrativity operate under a conceptual framework that succeed individually — see @TejuCole‘s Fénéon-esque “Small Fates” — but their success in aggregate is impossible to determine, since there are no milemarkers to aid in such aggregation.

I fear these projects are like a Broadway show in never-ending previews: How do you review something that’s never “done”? We might look to the literary criticism of cobbled-together posthumous novels like The Pale King or The Original of Laura, in which the product’s incompleteness is understood as a precondition for enjoyment. I can see a literary landscape five or ten years from now where this kind of artwork becomes the norm, where endings are considered an outmoded device.

Because I have an irrational fear of being without a book, I tend to overpack. But not this time. This time I’m going to bring exactly the right amount of books. And hopefully the right books, too.

I should mention my restrictions. I haven’t checked a bag at an airport in almost seven years; I don’t plan on starting now. So it’s a duffel bag with space for a maximum of two thick nonfiction books. (Why nonfiction? I’ve found I absorb far too much of the world of the novel when I travel, and not enough of the actual world around me.)

Here’s my shortlist:

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

Pro: This has been on my t0-read pile all year, even more so after the chorus of hosannas from DFW fans and literary critics.
Con: It’s only 300 pages, and I’ve been told it reads briskly. There’s nothing worse than burning through your vacation reads too quickly.

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt 

Pro: Ideas! Life! Philosophy! A perfect compendium for a holiday “off the grid,” as it were. This one’s also on the slim side page-wise, but I have to assume it’s dense enough for a fortnight of reading.
Con: This is the opposite of the traditional beach read.

The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka & the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers by Gordon Weiss

Pro: Just published in the U.S. by the wonderful Bellevue Literary Press, this is one of the few nonfiction accounts of the 25-year civil war between the Hindu Tamil minority and the Buddhist Sinhalese majority. (Fingers crossed the New Yorker‘s John Lee Anderson is working on one too.)
Con: Would you want to read about human rights atrocities committed in the very town you’re staying in for the first time?

The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham

Pro: Nick Harkaway’s endorsement in his “Year in Reading” column for The Millions was very selling: “Basically indispensable if you consider yourself an active and engaged citizen of a democratic nation. Cogent, elegant, clear, and simple – and short, which is a wonder – it’s absolutely required reading. Trust me: just pick it up and look at a little bit. Then tell me you don’t care about what he’s saying. (You won’t. You’ll buy the book and follow his lucid discussion to the end.)”
Con: Could be a bit dry.

All suggestions welcome! What would you bring on  a long trip?