There's a whole bunch going on tonight.
Knute Berger is reading...again. He's at Third Place this time. Erica's review of Knute Berger's book is over here. Here are some words from the review:
oppressed by "nanny statism," development, and change...white men...nightmarish megacity...sprawling megalopolis...nanny laws have regulated fun out of existence...destroyed by dense developments ..."nanny liberals," "radical cyclists," and "urban gentrifiers"...fancy urban lifestyles...hoary old-timers...oppressed by modernity..."affluent global transients"..."generic high rise[s] with concierge service"...chimeras, not people...complaints but no solutions...cognitive dissonance...nearly incoherent, Zen-like koans...Growth is bad, and growth won't fix it....we can't build a wall around Seattle.
And that's just a selection from the first half. You should read the rest, with all the connective words reinstalled.
At the University Book Store, Ronald White reads from A. Lincoln: A Biography, which is a biography of President Abraham Lincoln, not foxy stripper Ayisha Lincoln. It's apparently the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth this year, which is why there are Lincoln books everywhere. This one looks to be the most comprehensive biography of the bunch.
At the Hugo House, Cody Walker reads from Shuffle and Breakdown, his first collection of poetry. Walker is a very good and funny reader of his own work, and I'd recommend this reading. However, up at Open Books, Emily Warn is also reading. The Shadow Architect is a book of poetry about the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I can't tell you whether Warn is a good reader or not—I've never seen her read—but I can tell you that she's a good poet. So this is kind of a tossup.
And at Town Hall, Matt Miller picks over the corpse of tired liberal and conservative truisms in The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. Now's as good a time to do that as any. Also, hopefully, we can retire the terms "red state" and "blue state" while we're at it.
The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.
