I know that you had plans, but the Hugo House is hosting Seattle Haiku Night tonight. I hope your friends won’t mind so much when you cancel on them—perhaps you can even bring them along. I was very much into writing joke haiku (it was a nice way to spend long, boring hours at a retail job) until I heard a Budweiser commercial that was done entirely in haiku. Then, I figured it was time to put the age-old art back to bed for a while.

At noon, at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Barbara Pope, who is a professor of gender studies, signs from her book Cezanne’s Quarry, which is a mystery that involves the role of women in 19th century France. Frankly, this sounds like an ingenious way to get people who otherwise wouldn’t give a damn to read a gender studies text.

Speaking of painters: up at Third Place Books, Mary Lou Sanelli reads from her collection of poetry, Small Talk, which is a book that was inspired by a painting about a group of women talking. Somehow, a book of poetry with a hook like that is much more likely to be interesting to me. It’s kind of like Jay-Z’s American Gangster album in that way. If Sanelli’s next book is inspired by American Gangster, I will be sure to be in attendance.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Tom Spanbauer is in attendance. This is a great reading for Pride weekend, as many of the more book-happy gay people I know get all misty when they talk about reading Spanbauer for the first time. He’s apparently also a great teacher, too, and so he should give a great reading. He’ll be reading from Faraway Places, which was his first novel. It’s been out of print for a good long while and is just now being reissued.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, can be found on our books page.