2. If you like your strong women to be strong in a more literal sense, Elliott Bay Book Company is hosting a reading for the book Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women. Author David Chapman will be discussing the history of female weight lifting. I hear tell that several female bodybuilders will be in attendance, and that they might give a little bit of a show; this won't be your average book reading, to be sure.
3. Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place is a great noir novel from 1947 that was rediscovered in 2003 by The Feminist Press. If you're a fan of Chandler or Highsmith or Thompson, you seriously need to read this book. The 1950 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart is almost as good as the book. It's possibly his most complex performance, as a screenwriter with a messy past who is a suspect in a murder case. He gets involved with a woman who provides him with an alibi—she wants to believe he's a better man now. What could have become another cheesy romantic thriller in the hands of a weaker filmmaker is instead a searing study of a morally confused soul. The movie is playing at the Metro tonight. I guarantee you if you watch the movie, you'll want to read the book, too.
4. The reading calendar has much more information about everything.
