"The 'double reading' self-portrait" by dhammza. Cool! Seattlest's childhood summers were for three things: camping, sleeping late, and reading. The latter was the most pervasive. We borrowed stacks of ambitiously thick books at a time from the Lake Hills library--a bike ride through the greenbelt away--and we'd burrow somewhere comfortable to read for long hours. We inhaled books, goldfish crackers, and pina colada-flavored slurpees from the corner store during those summers like there was......

JUG BAND IDOL: Starting today, Greg Vandy of KEXP's The Roadhouse will hold live auditions for a new jug band. Without a harsh Brit, we're not sure what to expect, but we know it's unmissable. 6 p.m. // 90.3 FM // Free, not including cost of radio CELEBRITY SIGHTING: Danny Glover is expected to attend the showing of Trouble the Water, a SIFF documentary about one couple's stuggle to overcome the devastation wrought by......

FULL PUPPET NUDITY: You might have noticed that big banner on the side of the Paramount advertising puppet cleavage Avenue Q. Well, tonight is opening night, so if you haven't gotten your tickets for this ever-so-brief run of the Tony Award-winning show, now's your time. Seattlest will be there tonight for the kick-off, but then it's up to you to get out and see those puppets sing and swear all over the place. June 10-22......

READING: This weekend, 2008 Seattle Reads author Dinaw Mengestu is making the rounds to the city's libraries to read from The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. This novel about immigrant life in D.C. has gotten so much love from so many corners that we're kind of ashamed we haven't read it already. If you don't want to purchase this book, sign up now on the Holds list at the library: we're currently Hold #424.......

"Reflections on Old Justice" by Jonathan Hanlon Each plane of the central library's glass skin reflects, absorbs, or becomes transparent to light in different ways—like a giant, irregular gemstone—depending on your distance from it, your point of view, the time of day, and the weather. Jonathan captures each one of these behaviors in this shot. Thanks for sharing this with the Seattlest Flickr pool! Reflected in one plane is the extremely hot, albeit prosaically named,......

BOOKS: Novelist Richard Powers reads tonight at Benaroya Hall for Seattle Arts and Lectures. The former computer programmer's latest book, The Echo Maker, is "a haunting novel about memory, identity, and the boundaries of neuroscience," (Booklist), and won the National Book Award and all sorts of "Best Book of the Year" awards in 2006. He's a novelist of "ideas"; David Foster Wallace is a big fan. Here's an interview in the P-I. 7:30pm //......

Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert. Whatever the reason, there are 117 holds (and climbing) on Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational at the Seattle......

"An EnLIGHTened Ride" by Jonathan Hanlon The Seattlest Flickr pool knows how to navigate between floors at the downtown library. That's just how good we are.......

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library are trying to get people to write to members of the City Council in support of funding collections before the council meets to discuss the budget Tuesday, October, 30. Seriously, a $2.5 million shortfall this year, and a shortfall every year since 2000 when Libraries For All funded a bunch of building upgrades (including the Central Library)? That's really lame, particularly here where we get all proud......

Well-known alterna-librarian Jessamyn West came to town recently, and finally had a chance to check out our flagship library. Her verdict? I saw a real disconnect beween the lovely outside and grand entry spaces to the library, plus a few other very design-y areas, and the rest of the building. Materials were hard to find. VERY hard to find. Signage was abysmal, often just laserprinted pieces of paper, sometimes laminated and sometimes not. Doors to......

You may recall that Seattlest recently moved to Rainier Beach. The house we're renting came complete with a mystery: a newspaper box posted next to our mailbox. We haven't subscribed to a newspaper for over a decade but, we know what a newspaper box is for. What we don't know is anything about the newspaper advertising on our delivery receptacle: the Western Sun. Google? Nothing. Wikipedia? Nothing, unless it's an unmentioned alternate name for......

Oh, snap! That should read "The Big Harry and the Potters News This Week." The authors of songs such as "Save Ginny Weasley" and "Gryffindor Rocks" are touring the Northwest, and Friday they end up in Seattle for a performance we hear will be "AMAZING!" Hear more of their indie-HP geek stylings MySpace, then make plans to catch them live. Seriously. A friend of our says they really do rock. July 11th, Wednesday Tacoma Armory......

Tonight at the Central Seattle Public Library, Tim Westergren, founder of music software company/massive audio archive/internet radio service Pandora, hosts a public forum on his business model and the state of digital music as a whole. This get-together is a free event, open to everyone. It's a chance for me to share our story with you and hear what you have to say. I'll tell you about the Music Genome Project's beginnings, living through......

It's not only the anniversary of Mt. St. Helens exploding, it's also the event of a much more unexpected event: On May 18, 1992, for the very first time, a girl allowed 15-year-old Seattlest Seth to kiss her. If that isn't a shameless excuse for a Seattlest roundtable, what is? And so we present...Seattlest's first kiss: Seattlest Seth It was a high school bike trip to Lopez Island. The girl and I and some of......

Pretend for a moment that you work the circulation desk at a Seattle branch library. A patron asks you to change the information on his account. He's moving, so you change the address. And he asks you to change his default pickup branch to a new, rather distant location. From, say, North East to Rainier Beach. While you're doing this, you notice that he's got 18 hold requests already placed in the system. Pop quiz:......

Monday SHERMAN FREAKING ALEXIE: The best-selling author returns with his first novel in ten years. Flight tells the story of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity. Real Change-published poets (that would actually include Alexie, too) read as part of the program. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 LOCAL AUTHOR: Maya Sonenberg, the Creative Writing Program Director at the UW, presents a......

The Friends of The Seattle Public Library Book Sale The Library Book Sale is going on at Magnuson Park this weekend. If you haven't been you should go. If you've been there you know you should have been throwing elbows against the heavy bag for weeks--little old ladies don't move themselves when you're trying to get to those diamonds in the rough, but what a rough! We're talking about a few acres of loose, unsorted......

Monday PREQUEL TO MCARTNEY'S WINGS: Richie Unterberger, the author of several books on the history of rock, shows some film footage and plays some music recordings of unreleased Beatles material. He´s promoting his latest book, The Unreleased Beatles -- Music and Film. We had no idea they were in jail! (Ha! Because of the "unreleased" -- see how...oh...sure, we can move on.) 7pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE GARDENING AT......

It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess. That's kind of what Lawrence Cheek says in the PI today, where he dares to say what a lot of Seattleites are thinking: our new central library building isn't all that. This library, incredibly, is an uncomfortable place to read. The third-level "Living Room," which has the feel of a vast indoor park, is not conducive to......

    Seattle Public Library by Seattlest Flickrest inzenity. Seattlest loves the Seattle Public Library; sometimes we go downtown just to take pictures, people-watch, and just feel the library's vibe and the people using it in a variety of ways. We also love photographs taken there from great angles and of compelling subjects. All of this makes our cold, snarky heart warm up a few degrees and shed a few happy tears. Thank you......

THIS RECYCLED OLD HOUSE: Learn the secrets to using reclaimed and recycled materials in home building. Sustainable Ballard presents a panel and discussion on topics including material salvage and green remodeling. Take a tour of an eco-renovated house in the neighborhood. 6:30-7:45pm // Seattle Public Library Ballard Branch // FREE *FRIDAY* MOVIES: See the first movie about 9/11 we're actually excited for. Reign Over Me opens Friday and finally offers a human story about how......

Monday WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 AGORAPHOBES TAKE HEART: Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong. Love Will Find You is a new approach to love from dating expert Kathryn Alice. It may be the first dating......

Monday LESS IS MORE: In Trance of Scarcity: Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living Your Life, Victoria Castle asks why we feel that nothing is ever enough. Castle's book shows us how to escape this malaise and become more relaxed and alive. Hopefully it doesn't involve crisscrossing the U.S. on a book tour. 7pm // Third Place Books // FREE NATURE WRITING: Robert Michael Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

The American Institute of Architects asked 1800 Americans to name their favorite buildings in the US. After further refinement and surveying, the AIA compiled a list of the top 150 and released it on Wednesday. A grand total of two Seattle buildings made the list: at #108, the gorgeous but metroartificial Seattle Public Library; and at #135, Safeco Field. Nowhere to be found: the viaduct, the EMP, Smith Tower, Washington Mutual Tower, Rainier Tower, Qwest......

THEATER: The Brown Derby Series, which debilitated audiences last year with their staged production of Trapped in the Closet, is back, this time they're doing Total Recall. With Seattlest favorite Dusty Warren! Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm // Re-bar [1114 Howell] // $12, 21 and over only, runs through Thursday. No reservations, you may want to line up early. SPORTS: #1 O'Dea hosts #4 Chief Sealth. You've gotta see a game at O'Dea's gym......

The Seattle Public Library hosted 'A Salute to Tim Egan' last night at the inconvenient hour of 5:30 PM. Tim Egan is a Seattle native who won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 2001. He's most well known for writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago he was awarded the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Stories of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Seattle is......

Wednesday, November 29 >>>Third Place Books, 7:00pm. Another weighty tome, Unreleased Beatles by Richie Unterberger, to add to your Beatles-only reference section. It details the shitload of stuff that was recorded but, you know, forgotten about what with being so high at the time, plus the whole headtrip with Yoko. Free with OCD collecting disorder. >>>University Bookstore, 7:00pm. Elizabeth George backtracks: in her last Inspector Lynley mystery, the Inspector's wife was killed. In What......

Mark your calendars: starting November 1, the Seattle Public Library will be extending its DVD checkout period from one week (boo!) to two weeks. The Seattle Public Library will extend its loan period for DVDs from one week to two weeks beginning Wednesday, Nov. 1. The change also applies to DVD sets, such as television series and multi-part travel and history collections. A DVD may be renewed twice if there are no holds on the......

Due to the high volume of suggestions received, we are not able to notify you when items are not selected for purchase. If an item is selected for purchase, a hold will be placed for you, usually within two weeks. So declares the library's Suggestion for Purchase of DVDs, CDs and Audio Books page. We can probably assume, then, that the library has decided not to purchase Weeds: Season One on DVD, as we requested......