A teenage poetry reading followed by an open mic, a poetry slam, and a guide to “flora gawking” tonight, along with a few other readings.

Up at Third Place Books, Asara Lovejoy reads from The One Command, which is about creating wealth “with six steps to theta, the brainwave that opens unlimited potential and financial good.” Something tells me there’s gonna be a whole lot of brain use at this reading.

At the Seattle Public Library, Stephen L. Carter reads from his new mystery thriller, Palace Council. I was excited about this book—Nixon’s a character—but then I read this Entertainment Weekly review of the book, which begins like this:

Stephen L. Carter’s new novel, Palace Council, comes billed as a political thriller, but the most compelling mystery here has nothing to do with its botched suspense plot. How is it that the writer of The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White — bona fide page-turners set among the black upper class — has published a third novel that reads like a first draft? Why would this Yale Law professor and celebrated public intellectual construct a sub-Dan Brown cryptography thriller that panders to yahoo paranoia about New World Order high jinks?

And now I don’t want to read it anymore. (And before anyone gets huffy, I have to say that Entertainment Weekly does good reviews of thrillers and other pop-lit books. I don’t trust their judgment on literary fiction, but in this case, the comparison to Dan Brown alone is enough to make me skip Palace Council. I’ve read enough Da Vinci Code ripoffs in the last few years, thankyewverymuch.)

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, in the best-looking reading of the night, Steve Kozlowski reads from The Last Polar Bear, which is a book about polar bears and how we’re fucking slaughtering them. The first thing we have to do is keep them away from treadmills:

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.