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1. Tomorrow night, Spine & Crown Books hosts what I believe is their first-ever reading. It is also the final reading of 2011. Appropriately titled Death Hums, it's the first Seattle edition of a New York City-based readings series that will soon publish its own literary magazine. Readers include David Weisberg and Spine and Crown owner Kristofor Minta. The headliner is Nico Vassilakis, who is Seattle's premier word scientist. His poetry often explores the very idea of a word as a visual symbol, and his experimental performances are the kind of challenging theater that often leaves you tense, wondering what he's going to do next. This is a fine way for Seattle literature to close out 2011.

2. If you're not in Seattle, or if you just have a lot of time to kill in the upcoming weekend, I just noticed that Arizona bookstore Changing Hands is selling seven Google e-books by Philip K. Dick at $3.99 apiece through Monday the 2nd. For twelve bucks, you could walk away with editions of VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. If you've never bought Google e-books before, it's a pretty simple process, and while they encourage you to read the books online, you can also download them as files. Google requires you to download the books as Adobe Editions, but—and this is not an endorsement, mind you—if an enterprising individual cared to strip the e-books of DRM, that's a fairly easy thing to do nowadays.

3. UPDATE WITH MORE BOOK BARGAINS! Slog tipper Martin says

Bad Monkeys is .99 on Google Books and for Kindle right now. I noted it because it went to that price the day after I bought it for $9.99, but I'm not complaining. More money for Matt Ruff is not a bad thing in my book. Pun semi-intended; semi-regretted.

If you like Philip K. Dick, you should absolutely buy Bad Monkeys right now. It's a twisty espionage book told from the perspective of a completely unreliable narrator, and questions of trust, identity, and truth figure heavily into the plot. Ruff is a great Seattle writer—he's got a new one out in a couple months—and this is one of his liveliest, most readable books.