Paging a great spring celebration: The free Festival of Books prepares to bloom

Our TBR stack in IRL can be pretty LOL, TBH; we do love a tower of tempting books to be within our immediate vicinity at all times, even if we're still poring through the brick-heavy tome at our bedside.

But since TBR-ing our worlds is one of our main and merriest pastimes, as it is for so many lovers of literature, thrilling yarns, and incredible authors, we're forever on the lookout for large-scale, super-layered, incredibly intriguing book festivals.

And if they're free? No LOL-ing here: We're as excited as when we find out the person we thought did it really did it in a favorite whodunit.

One of the bookish biggies, and we mean that on a pretty much worldwide scale, is the one that flowers at the University of Southern California campus each spring.

It's the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and it is headed back to its spacious, stroll-ready digs on April 20 and 21.

Booth after booth after book-crammed booth draws the attention of the festival's attendees, readers who do love to linger by tables heaped with the latest YA adventures, moving autobiographies, complex anthologies, and buzzy graphic novels.

Meeting new authors or longtime favorites is part of the brainy bliss-out; chats about upcoming releases and decades-old memoirs might happen in any booth at any time.

But "time" is a topic to keep a keen eye on, of course; there are oodles of special events filling out the festival's always full-to-brimming schedule.

While general entry to the festival is free, author talks and celebrity panels can come with their own ticket, so you'll want to explore who will be where and when before making for the university.

The 2024 panel topics include "Out of Office: The Workplace Comedy-Drama in Contemporary Fiction," "Got Books? Why Reading Matters," and "Haunted: The Contemporary Gothic Novel."

Some of the headlining participants include RuPaul, Kerry Washington, John Green, and Beth Pratt; dozens of other luminaries are set to show, including, fingers crossed, a few writers you'd love to see speak in person.

This page-laden lark is awash in wondrous words, but also a spirit of community, a love of broadening the mind and heart, and plenty of sunshine, usually.

Oh yes, and food trucks, live tunes, and other delightful diversions; peruse this handy site, which serves as a table of contents to the to-do, before making one of Southern California's, and the planet's, twinkliest tomefests.