There are a bunch of great-looking readings tonight.

At the Ballard Branch of the Seattle Public Library, there's a reading for Seattle Noir, a collection of mystery stories set in Seattle. Bharti Kirchner, Stephan Magcosta, and Brian Thornton will read their selections tonight.

And Anne Bishop reads from The Shadow Queen, the seventh installment in a fantasy series, at University Book Store.

Up at Third Place Books, we have Mishna Wolf. I'm Down is a pretty hilarious memoir about being white in a black neighborhood in Rainier Valley. Wolf also reads at Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday. You should attend one of her readings.

Seattle Asian Art Museum hosts Monica Ali. Ali's new novel In the Kitchen is about a dead immigrant and an "eerie, ethereal young woman" with some secrets. (The cover illustrating this post is the British edition cover. I'm just assuming it's better than the American edition, because British editions are always more attractive than the American edition.

And the Hugo House is having its Writers-in-Residence Reading. Hugo House writers-in-residence Arianne Bergman, Angela Jane Fountas and Ed Skoog will be leaving. This is a goodbye party and reading. We will especially miss Skoog, who is leaving the state for a yearlong position in Washington DC. He insists that Seattle will remain his home.

And last, and maybe least, at Elliott Bay Book Company, Kaya Oakes reads from her book Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. Oakes had better explain exactly what the fuck "indie" means, because once they applied that term to the band Bush in the mid-90s, the label stopped making sense.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.