Stewart Brand reads at both Elliott Bay Book Company and Barnes & Noble University Village. Brand's book Whole Earth Discipline is subtitled An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Pragmatism has gotten the modern environmental movement to where it is today, after all.

Toni Weschler is reading at Hillel at the University of Washington. She is the author of Taking Charge of Your Fertility and Cycle Savvy: A Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body will discuss how women should understand their own bodies, which is a controversial topic in, say, Georgia. Women should be required to read both of these books.

Near the Weschler reading at University Book Store, Lull Mengesha reads from his memoir The Only Black Student. When Mengesha was in school, he attended a Primarily White Institution, which the press release capitalizes.

Town Hall hosts Fulvio Melia tonight. Despite the Da Vinci Code-like title, Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics looks like a serious book about science, which is very exciting.

And Jess Walter reads at Elliott Bay Book Company. If Jonathan Lethem weren't coming to town, this would have been the book I read for last week's book section. Walter is the author of the great Citizen Vince and the very good The Zero. Both, vaguely, are crime novels. They're really great, funny, smart books, and they're both out in paperback, and you should read them. Tonight, Walter returns with his new, much-buzzed-about novel The Financial Lives of the Poets. It's all about a failed dot-com entrepreneur whose wife is cheating on him. That sounds as though it may be pretty generic, but I guarantee that Walter's found a way to make it fresh. Go to this reading and take his fiction out for a test spin. Kick the tires. I bet you'll like what you find.

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.