A book about utopia, an open mic, and a whole lot more going on tonight.

Up in Port Townsend, it’s the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference, a weeklong festival packed with readings. Today, Chris Abani, who wrote Graceland and now seems to put out a book every week or so, will be reading. He’s always fun live. Also in Port Townsend, Joan Larkin, who has edited many, many excellent gay and feminist anthologies, will be speaking.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Susanna Sonnenberg reads from Her Last Death, which is a memoir about Sonnenberg’s mother, who was a con artist. There seem to be a whole lot of memoirs about con artist parents. This of course means that con artists frequently beget writers, which says something about writers, I think.

Lastly, up at Third Place Books, Marten Troost reads from Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid. Sometimes I wish that I could Google-cache search books that are in my hand, because I’d love to know if the word ‘inscrutable’ shows up in this book and I’m too lazy to scour. The fact that there’s a fortune-cookie fortune on the cover seems to imply things about this book that I’m simply not ready to consider this early in the morning.

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