What's the book? Sterling's Gold by Roger Sterling.

Why is it useless? It's a collection of "Wit & Wisdom" from a fictional character on the TV show Mad Men. For some reason, some of the quotes are in all caps. Samples of wit and wisdom: "LOOK AT THIS PLACE. I DON'T WANT TO SOUND SENTIMENTAL BUT IT'S NOT JUST ACCOUNTS. LOOK AROUND HERE AT WHAT YOU HAVE." There's never any more than one quote per page, and a few blurry photos from the television show are sprinkled throughout. Other samples of quotes: "I'll put on my whites and we'll pretend it's V-J Day," "I TRY TO BE AS CIVILIZED AS YOU CAN BE," and "Dogs are winners." Are those wit, or are they wisdom? I can't tell.

Could anyone enjoy this book? Even if you like the TV show, I don't think you'd enjoy this book. It's literally just some lines lifted from the show. And it's $16.95. Just awful.

This post was written by books intern Anna Minard.

No one can say exactly why these books have the momentum they have right now. They're really fun books—dark, addictive and exciting. The unsubtle-but-smart commentary is perfectly timely. That just doesn't wholly explain their level of popularity. A phenomenon becomes what it is through some unreproduceable perfect storm—at just the right moment, a book written in just the right way on just the right kind of topic gets out to just the right kind of readers and it builds on itself. Harry Potter was not the first book about a boy wizard, and Stephenie Meyer didn't invent anything but the sparkles. It's always a mystery—not that people don't try, over, and over, to explain it and replicate it.

So the days are getting darker and the weather's getting crappier, and dystopic fiction makes a fine fireplace read. You should really check these books out. And if you don't know where to go after Hunger Games, head over to Questionland, where other people have already asked and answered that question. Or you could go into any library or bookstore and tell someone in the kids and teens department, "So I've just finished The Hunger Games…" They'll start walking you over to the dystopic fiction display before you even finish your sentence.

• Pete Ryan

Are there any romances out there that are actually good?

There must be some, right? Other maligned genres (scifi, mystery) have people writing in them that both honor and transcend those genres. I've never read a romance novel, but someone must be writing interesting ones. Right? Any ideas?

Sure there are. The problem is that they generally shy away from the "romance" label and refer to themselves as "literary fiction" to convince people to pick them up. But literary fiction is way too broad a label, so here are a few specific titles to get you started.

One Day by David Nicholls just came out in the U.S. this summer. (It was a runaway bestseller in England.) It's a love story about two friends who sleep together once in college. The book's conceit is that each chapter only visits them on one particular day every year—-the anniversary of the morning after their college hookup. It moves along quickly, and the characters are fun and cute, even if it falls apart a bit at the end, there. (A similar reading experience to One Day: Claire Marvel by John Burnham Schwarz.)

Ron Hansen put out "an entertainment" a few years ago called Isn't It Romantic?. It's about a young French couple who get in a fight in a small Nebraska town. It's a super-light, enjoyable souffle of a book, and cleverly written.

What about High Fidelity? Nick Hornby launched a whole fleet of books about romance and relationships from a man's perspective. And Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story is a sweet real-life romance.

It's interesting to me that almost all the books I can think of were written by men. I wonder if female authors shy away from writing straight-up love stories because they're afraid of the romance-novel label? I've read some great books with romance in them—-Aimee Bender's An Invisible Sign of My Own has an adorable romance in it—-but I can't seem to think of that many books by female literary authors that would qualify as romantic. The only one at the moment that I can think of is Emma Donoghue's Landing, which is a lovely story about a long-distance lesbian love affair.

To find other Questionlanders' suggestions for romantic reads—Jane Austen! Georgette Heyer!—follow this here linky-text.

Elliott Bay Book Company is hosting Shailja Patel tonight at 7. Patel is a poet and playwright. Migritude is a book that is based on a play written by Patel. It's made up of reportage and memoir and history, and it's all about women and migration "in the boot print of Empire."

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!

He was not reading any of these things. He was reading a book by the musician Billy Bragg, who I guess also writes books. Title: The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging. The county executive then pulled out his portable telephone device to show me a photo of himself with Billy Bragg:

In other news, the classical music was a hit—downright jaunty at times—and no one broke anything or fell.

This afternoon at the Central Library, Nikki McClure will talk. The beloved Olympia artist, whose cut-paper artwork you see everywhere nowadays, will talk about her newest book, How to Cook the Perfect Day.

The Hugo House will be hosting Cheap Wine and Poetry tonight. The very popular and very entertaining reading series closes out 2010 with readers including Elissa Ball, Evan Peterson, Sean O'Connor and Mary Purdy. Wine will be, as always, a buck a glass.

Nicole Krauss reads at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. I don't usually bet against Cheap Wine and Poetry, but this is the reading of the night. The books lead this week is all about Krauss's new novel Great House. It's a book about a desk that changes hands from owner to owner:

One way to read Great House would be as a haunted-house story, with the desk's drawers and monstrous silhouette standing in as a miniature house. There's enough Gothic imagery here to make a case for that reading. Even as the story moves to London and Jerusalem and America, it's hard not to imagine Emily Brontë's foggy moor skulking around outside every window. Sometimes the horrors even come right up to the window for an overt moment of terror, as when a young man "in a strange, almost pitiful coat with a matted fur collar" stares with "black shining eyes" at a mother and child "with the hunger of a wolf."

And at Open Books, Dorothea Lasky and Lewis Warsh will read. I don't know anything about Warsh, but Black Life, Lasky's most recent collection of poems, was published by outstanding local press Wave Books. You can find a couple of her poems over at The Awl. She's really phenomenal.

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!

This guy can read a Kindle and a physical book while driving on the highway and talking on the phone. He is bridging the digital divide and entertaining the fellows who videotaped his antics all at the same time.

(Via Gizmodo.)

If you enjoy the twice-yearly Friends of the Library Book Sale at Magnuson Park, this is important news. This e-mail from Friends of the Library is making the rounds:

As some of you may know, questions have arisen in the past about the continued use of the hangar in Building 30 at Magnuson Park where we hold our book sales. Recently the Parks Department was notified by the Department of Planning and Development and the Fire Marshall’s office that, since holding events in Building 30 has been a non-conforming use, the building requires updates to meet current code to become an event facility. Therefore, DPD will now seriously curtail the number of events permitted.

Although the Book Sale will be able to hold its spring 2011 and fall 2011 sales, there is no guarantee that we will be able to continue to do so in the future. Seattle, famous as a city of readers, would lose an event that enables thousands of families the opportunity to purchase books they may not otherwise be able to afford. The Book Sale recycles back into the community hundreds of thousands of books each year.

Bringing Building 30 up to code would preserve this unique space to ensure a permanent community event venue for the Book Sale and for numerous other events, many of which are nonprofits. This would serve a large number of organizations benefiting the cultural richness of our city and providing a future revenue stream for the city. There is no other comparable facility available in Seattle which nonprofits could afford to use.

Please contact the Seattle City Council and Mayor and urge them to find the funds to renovate Building 30 so that the Book Sale and other events can continue to provide important contributions to the greater Seattle community.

The Friends of the Library do very good work and their book sale is one of the highlights of Seattle's literary calendar. (Proceeds from the sale also provide significant annual donations for SPL, which is already strapped for cash.) If you care about SPL, you should let the City Council and Mayor McGinn know that this is important to you.

• Kelly O

And then there are two events at Town Hall. Alex Steffen, the cofounder of Worldchanging, talks on the subject of "Carbon Neutral Cities." But the reading of the night at Town Hall is about that Four Loko hangover you've got. Ari Berman, a political correspondent for The Nation, talks with awesome local author Tim Egan and The Stranger's beloved associate editor, Eli Sanders about the election results and what they mean for us going forward. Egan will provide historical perspective and Berman has done a lot of research into the rise of the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. Eli, of course, knows everything about everything.

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!

Amazon is giving money to the prestigious Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. And Book Fox is nervous about it:

Call me cynical, but I see this as part of Amazon's overall strategy to gain market share and shut out publishers. If they can control the process from literary journals to publishers to marketing to distribution to sales, then they truly control the entire chain of production.

I think Book Fox's comments are kind of extreme. Amazon's charitable giving has thus far been completely string-free. They don't own the new work that is read at the Hugo House, for example. They don't require writers to plug Amazon.com in their stories. They don't have a hand in the selection process at Kenyon Review. Amazon is publishing their own work now, and publishers are nervous about that, but the work that Amazon is publishing is completely separate from these charitable gifts.

The fact is, if you're going to start looking for secret agendas in corporate charitable giving, you've got a lifetime of misery blocked out ahead of you. Amazon is giving money to these contests and charities because it creates goodwill for Amazon.com among the literary community. That's not some secret plot to control the creation of literature; it's just good business sense. (And it's the right thing to do.)

...anyone who's ever attended a Cherie Priest reading knows that the Q&A; session is the main event. The local sci-fi author speaks with the urgent, nerdy energy of someone who has spent a lot of time on internet message boards—the word "epic," the phrase "You're doing it wrong," the use of "win," as in "full of..."—and she has a refreshing, unguarded whatever-goes honesty that you almost never hear at book readings. She'll talk royalties and sales figures and insidery publishing information to anyone who shows an interest.

Or if your National Novel Writing Month novel features zombies, you should head out to Bellevue, where Kevin Emerson is teaching a class titled "Zombies and the Secret Ingredients of Ghoulish Writing."

T.S. McHugh's in Queen Anne is hosting Science on Tap tonight. Tonight's lecture and discussion is titled "Keeping Technology Secure: Medical Devices, Robots, Cars, And More." This is an important topic, which is why they serve beer.

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!

If the subject matter is interesting to you, I'd suggest reading Body Type and Body Type 2: More Typographic Tattoos instead. Though not every tattoo here has a literary source, the interviews feel much less cursory. For example: The owner of a "What is past is prologue" tattoo discusses why she chose those words (she's an abuse survivor) and the font (Palatino is "a book font.") The interviews only run to blurb-length, at most a modest paragraph, but they feel more incisive, more telling of the interviewee. The Body Type books feel more like solid, substantive art books (though of course not every tattoo is a winner—see the woman who had "OBAMA" tattooed upside down on the inside of her bottom lip). They're more worth your while.

On October 29th, Pilot Books launched the newest issue of their e-zine, SMALLS. Contributors include Matthew Simmons, Nico Vassilakis, and Jennifer Williams. It's available for you to read here. And it's free.

And something that is not free, but is really very important, is Pilot Books' Kickstarter page for Bamwood. If they can raise the funds (they're more than halfway there,) Pilot Books will record independent lit readings around town and put them online for all to see. In an ideal world, every bookstore would make high-quality recordings of their readings and post them online. A lot of the time, readings become very important in retrospect, when an author becomes wildly popular, when an author passes away, when a book goes out of print. I hope this project will lead the way for a bunch of other bookstores. Give till it hurts, please.

• Caitlin Kittredge

One of the most illuminating answers is about quitting her day job, and how it's almost impossible for writers to find any kind of financial security.

Bookstores take orders on commission, and they make their returns (of unsold books, back to the publisher) at their leisure and discretion. So sometimes returns come back thirty days after shipping, sometimes they come back six months later. There's no way to know; it varies from store to store - even within chains. Therefore, it's very, very hard to get a firm accounting on anything in too much less than a year.

As I said in my story about her this week, Priest is very generous and honest with her question-answering, and it's making for an epic Questionland experience. Get in there and ask your questions now.

Up at Third Place Books, Chris Kimball, the author of Fannie's Last Supper: Two Years, Twelve Courses, and Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook, will discuss using an old cookbook to make a newish meal. We are apparently in Gigantic Cookbook Reading Month, so if you haven't attended a cookbook reading this month, here's an opportunity for you to do so.

And at Town Hall, Todd Shea will give "A Report from Flood-Ravaged Pakistan." Shea, who is apparently considered “the world’s go-to guy for disaster relief,” will discuss the woefully underexamined recent floods in Pakistan.

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!

First, and probably most importantly, Ian Frazier reads at the Central Library. Travels in Siberia is a book by the very funny author about Siberia and its history.

Then it's time for the scary stuff at Town Hall, in a performance titled "Short Stories Live: The Witching Afternoon." Trained readers will perform "Wicked John and the Devil," "Young Goodman Brown," and "Narrative of The Ghost of a Hand."

And then Tom Raworth and Joel Felix will be at Pilot Books tonight. This is a very rare appearance from Raworth, who will be reading a new essay.

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 something to read, you can get personalized book recommendations from myself and a team of 5 expert booksellers from Third Place Books over at Questionland. Tell us what books you've loved, what subject you'd like to learn about, or what kind of person you're looking to give a book to and we'll have a few great recommendations for you in no time flat. Ask away!