Whuh? I'm awake! So there's a reading at the library at noon today. A librarian will read the story "Slowly, Slowly in the Wind" to you for free. The story was written by Patricia Highsmith. She's one of my favorite writers, and she should be one of your favorite writers, too. Her Ripley series was an exceptional turning point in crime fiction.

Inner Chapters, down in South Lake Union, hosts a reading for a journal called Birkensnake. Birkensnake is an "imperfectly-bound collection of fiction" which is irregularly produced, like the best things in life, in Rhode Island. I got a couple copies of Birkensnake last week, and it's really a charming, hand-bound magazine. And Inner Chapters is a charming bookstore. Can you handle this much charm? I think you can.

Graham Joyce is at the Hugo House tonight. Joyce wrote the great fantasy novel The Tooth Fairy, among other fun, interesting, compelling novels. If you have any tolerance for fantasy in your fiction, I highly recommend you check out The Tooth Fairy; it's all about a boy's odd relationship with, well, the Tooth Fairy, who turns out to be a lot like the crazy lady we all dated back in the college years. But don't take my word for it: You should read this blurb for the book:

"Brilliant and unclassifiable, The Tooth Fairy is by turns tender, nightmarish, and hilarious, with hard-won wisdom and a rare sense of time and place, of lives truly lived."
—Jonathan Lethem

Which brings me to the next and final event tonight. Jonathan Lethem is at the Sunset Tavern tonight at 7pm, reading from his new novel Chronic City. I will be in conversation with Lethem at this event. Here is the first paragraph of what I had to say about Chronic City:

With all due respect to Camelot, Dickensian London, and Mort Weisinger's Metropolis, if I had to choose one fictional location in which I had to spend the rest of my life, I would choose Jonathan Lethem's New York City. There's plenty of room there for heroism (it's the kind of city where a detective with Tourette's syndrome can unravel an immense, shadowy conspiracy) and music (in The Fortress of Solitude, 1970s Brooklyn seemed to be the set of an enormous hiphop musical set to the lazy beat of shiny pink Spaldeen rubber balls slapping against the sides of brownstones). It's a city teeming with life, from the gilt, smoky splendor of a Christmas party at the mayor's mansion to "a long line of sidewalk peddlers, each behind their various tables full of socks and gloves, digital watches and batteries, pre-owned magazines and bootleg DVDs, a stilled caravan sloping down Eighty-sixth street."

I hope you'll join us tonight. Lord knows you have a lot of great options.

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.