Jackie Burrell, Writer

If spending a day in a bookstore, browsing books and compiling an ever bigger TBR pile for the nightstand is appealing (raises hand 🙋‍♀️), circle this Saturday on your calendar – er, create an event on your Google cal. April 25 is Independent Bookstore Day, and bookish celebrations are unfolding at 2,000 indie bookshops across the country. Here’s a smattering of Bay Area possibilities:

Menlo Park’s Kepler’s is hosting a literary trivia session at 2 p.m. that day and a book talk with author Laura Dave at 4:30 chatting about her new The First Time I Saw Him, the sequel to her best-selling, crazy suspenseful The Last Thing He Told Me. 

Corte Madera’s Book Passage is offering an entire day of indie bookstore day events, including Pulitzer novelist Jane Smiley at 11 a.m. Saturday Smiley’s newest book, Lidie, takes readers from the “Bloody Kansas” frontier of 1857, where battles between pro-slavery interlopers and abolitionists set the stage for the Civil War, to Liverpool, England. Vibrant settings, both of them, but the story’s stars are two exuberantly fierce women, Lidie Newton and her niece, Annie. (Smiley will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz tonight at 7 p.m., btw.) There’s an Authors on the Plaza book fair at 1 p.m. featuring local authors, Left Coast Writers and the California Writers Club of Marin, and author and activist Deborah Santana will talk about her memoir Loving the Fire: Choosing Me, Finding Freedom at  4 p.m. 

If you’re beachbound, Bookshop Santa Cruz is hosting an evening of literary trivia from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on topics ranging from banned books to literary couples. And here you thought your impressive, obsessive grasp of Elizabeth Bennet lore was a waste of time. (Plus, there’s beer.)