Anyone who’s read his Mumbai crime epic Sacred Games knows Vikram Chandra is one of the best, most ambitious novelists in the world. Tonight, he’s trying something new: Chandra will read from his first book of nonfiction, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. Plenty of authors fear code-writing—as though HTML threatens prose for some reason—but Chandra recognizes the art of code and eagerly investigates tech-nerd culture in an effort to understand his own journey as a writer. Can he fuse two very different kinds of nerdery into one cohesive whole? (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 7:30 pm, $5)