Sometimes an idea is so simple, it's hard to explain. For about a year now, the Movable Type Mixer has been happening on a quarterly basis at Vermillion. There's no cover charge. There's no public speaking, or trust exercises, or speed dating. There's only one requirement: Bring the book you're reading and be ready to talk about it. That's it. You almost want there to be an extra hook, but there isn't one. Simple.

And fun, too: Past Movable Types have spawned conversations between obsessive five-book-a-week readers, poets, novelists, academics, and folks who manage to get through one book a year. I've talked with nice people about Kafka and Stephen King and a memoir about a peculiar cat and urban planning, and I felt a wave of euphoria when I saw a woman carrying a beautiful new edition of Jim Dodge's bighearted, bizarre novella Fup. It's practically impossible to have a bad time.

Movable Type founder Amy Levenson has worked in international publishing for nine years, and she believes books are the one topic that can pump all the awkwardness out of a stiff social situation. She's got a contagious laugh, and she hosts the mixers with admirable ease, introducing strangers and launching conversations fearlessly. Levenson got the idea for Movable Type when she happened upon a Parisian bar that hosted a monthly book-club night. "Book clubs are usually small and private," she explains, but "the idea of expanding one to anybody who wanted to come makes it completely unpredictable." When she moved to town, she realized that "Seattle has such a great literary community" that her idea "seemed like a perfect fit. And less pretentious than Paris." She decided to use the events to promote her favorite literary nonprofit, a local adult literacy foundation called Literacy Source, but her mid-mixer pitches for Literacy Source are short and low-pressure. Levenson says it was "shockingly simple" to establish and promote the event.

Her favorite Movable Type conversation so far was over a 1950s text titled The Scientific Feeding of Chickens, and she's now in the middle of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves thanks to a series of recommendations from the last mixer. But what about the dreaded Seattle Freeze? How does Movable Type make Seattleites feel comfortable talking to each other? "Even if people can't look at your face, they'll look at your book and talk about it," she says. "It's the most un-Seattle event you'll go to." recommended