Today we have an open mic and a number of readings. Dinaw Mengestu, author of the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be finishing his run as the Seattle Reads author. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. He’s done like ninety events a day for the last three days, though, so he might not be as fresh as when he started out.

Also, we have the Emerald City Comicon at the convention center. Many years ago now, when I was starting out at The Stranger, I wrote a piece about Comicon. It was too mean. I got many responses to the piece, and one of them said: “Why don’t you go back to jerking off over Suicide Girls” or something along those lines. I would just like to point out that, as entertainment at the Emerald City Comicon, the Suicide Girls will be in attendance. And so I say to the person who wrote me back then: I apologize for my meanness, sir, but now it is time for you to go jerk off over the Suicide Girls. And to the founders of the convention: this is not the way to get more women to take comics seriously, boys.

Up at the University Village Barnes and Noble, Annie Griffiths Belt will discuss being a photographer for National Geographic and being a mother. She is a good person to discuss this, since she is both a photographer for National Geographic and a mother.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, in the afternoon, Emily Transue, a local doctor who has read at virtually every bookstore in town, will be reading. In the later afternoon, Raj Patel, a man who has been “tear-gassed on four continents,” will be reading from Stuffed and Starved, which is kind of an anti-Michael Pollan book about the global food shortage from tiny, gorgeous publisher Melville House. This is the reading to attend, in my opinion.

And then, also at Elliott Bay in the evening, Sarah Katherine Lewis will read from her book Sex and Bacon. I assigned that book to a Stranger writer to review, but the reviewer declined to review it, because the book was bad, but not bad in any sort of an interesting way. I read Indecent, Lewis’s previous book, and it was horrible, and not in an interesting way. So at least she’s consistent.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.