Many open mics, a book about Norwegian Seattle, and more going on tonight.

Charlie Huston reads at both the Seattle Mystery Book Shop and at Third Place Books today. His novel is a mystery, the well-named The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. It's about "a slacker" who becomes a crime scene cleaner. And I presume he solves a mystery, too. At the Mystery Book Shop reading, he will be joined by the author of Greasing the Piñata, which sounds much dirtier than it probably is.

At University Book Store, Maria Semple reads from This One is Mine is a novel about a TV writer. Semple used to write for TV. Expect questions about how much of the book is real.

At the Hugo House, it's time for Cheap Wine and Poetry. Readers include the lovely Rebecca Hoogs and the great Ed Skoog. Despite the abundance of "oog" going on there, they are both very good local poets. And they are joined by another very good local poet who I (coincidentally) wrote about in last week's Constant Reader:

Recently, New Mexico publisher Destructible Heart Press published a handsome chapbook called An Inaccurate Theory of Everything by Seattle poet Jeremy Richards. It's a perfect example of how a poem can be smart, affecting, and funny.

The book opens with "T. S. Eliot's Lost Hip Hop Poem" ("Straight out of Missouri,/Harvard University in your face./I've got ladies in waiting all over/the place, singing each to each;/do I dare eat a peach?... For I will tell you/that I have scuttled across the floors of ancient clubs..."), and it continues with poems that start with a standup comic's sense of playfulness and land with a perfect dismount as something more profound. One poem theorizes about amnesia foam mattresses, the logical opposite of memory foam ("Who are you? ask the coils./Why do you feel so familiar?"), and ends with a meditation about how past relationships are inevitably forgotten ("The secret to balance is to fall/In every direction at once").

This is obviously the reading of the night. And if that's not enough to convince you to go, it's free, and wine sells for a buck a glass.

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