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Showing results for Vroman's Bookstore — you typed vroman s bookstore

Everything at Vroman'S Bookstore — including past events

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12 days away

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John Stephens, "Age of Fury"

In 13 days · Oct 20 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

The kids who were handed a fat fantasy paperback at the right age did not read it so much as move into it, and they are adults now with the sequels still outstanding in their heads. Stephens writes that kind of book - the enormous, plot-dense, siblings-against-an-unfair-cosmos kind - and he came to it after a career writing television, which shows in the pacing and in how little patience he has for a slow chapter. The Pasadena crowd for this skews younger and more enthusiastic than the usual weeknight author event, which changes the texture of the questions entirely: fewer people asking about process, more people asking what happens to a particular character and refusing to accept a non-answer. Vroman's has been in business since 1894 and has the oldest bookstore charter in Southern California, and the second-floor room where this happens still has the feel of a place where the staff decide the programming rather than a publisher. Free, open to anyone, seven o'clock on a Tuesday. Bring the kid who will not stop talking about the first one, or come alone and admit it is for you.

Monthly

20 days away

Vroman's Fiction Reading Group

Monthly · Next Oct 28 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Reading alone is fine until you finish something enormous and realise there is nobody in your life you can say the last page to. That is the hole this fills, on the fourth Wednesday of every month, upstairs, for an hour, for free. No application, no reading list you have to have kept up with, no requirement beyond having read the book or being willing to sit there while people who did talk about it. October's is Lincoln in the Bardo, which is George Saunders at his strangest - a graveyard, a grieving president, a hundred and sixty-six narrators interrupting each other - and it is precisely the kind of book that works better out loud with other people than it does alone in a chair. The group skews across four decades of age, which is unusual and is the best thing about it; the retired teacher and the twenty-four-year-old disagree about the same paragraph and both turn out to be right. It is one hour. It meets whether or not you came last month. Second floor of the oldest bookstore in Southern California, every fourth Wednesday, indefinitely.

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

Coming Soon

21 days away

Kevin Waite, "The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West"

Oct 29, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

You can stand at the corner of Spring and Third in downtown Los Angeles and not know that the ground under you was owned, in the 1860s, by a woman who had walked to California behind a wagon as someone else's property and then sued her way free in a Los Angeles courtroom. Biddy Mason bought that lot, became one of the wealthiest landowners in the city, founded the First African Methodist Episcopal church in her own home, and then was mostly written out of the story of how this place was built. Waite is a historian at Durham who works on slavery in the American West - the part of the history that the national narrative keeps placing somewhere else - and he has reconstructed her life from the court records. This is the rare local-history event that is genuinely news rather than nostalgia. Free, upstairs at Vroman's, a Thursday evening in Pasadena. There is a memorial wall to her downtown on the alley that bears her name, and almost nobody who walks past it knows what it commemorates. After this you will.

This Happened

Monte Burke, "Men of Troy: The Epic Afternoons, Wild Nights, and Enduring Legacy of Pete Carroll's USC Trojans"

Today · Oct 7 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

For about seven years this city had a football team that felt less like a program and more like a weekly party everyone was invited to, and if you were here for it you have never entirely stopped talking about it. The Coliseum on a hot afternoon, a roster that read like a future NFL draft board, a coach who seemed to be having more fun than anybody. Burke went and reported the whole thing out - the afternoons and, pointedly, the wild nights - and the book is neither a hagiography nor a hit piece, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. What makes this worth a Wednesday in Pasadena is the room rather than the reading. A sports book event at a literary bookstore draws two crowds who do not normally sit together: people who can still name the 2005 starting backfield, and people who came because they trust the store's judgement about nonfiction. The second floor event space holds maybe eighty, free, no ticket. Someone will ask about the Bush Push and the answer will take fifteen minutes. That is the whole reason to come.

Sonali Kolhatkar discusses & signs Breaking Ice: Community Defense Against State Terror and Maga Fascism

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Sonali Kolhatkar discusses & signs Breaking Ice: Community Defense Against State Terror and Maga Fascism

Sep 3, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Political exhaustion has a particular texture: too much input, no framework, nowhere to set any of it down. It arrives in fragments, mostly through people angrier than you and less informed, until caring at that volume starts to make you useless. There is a real difference between doomscrolling and sitting in a room while a journalist who has covered immigration enforcement and community response for years lays out how the pieces connect, then takes questions from strangers who are just as tired as you are. Breaking Ice is an argument about community defense, and the crowd it pulls in Pasadena tends to be people who came straight from work, still in the clothes, choosing this over the couch. Expect long questions and longer answers. Nobody leaves early, and the room is small enough that you end up talking to whoever sat down next to you. Thursday the 3rd, 7:00pm. RSVP required.

This Happened

Sam Quinones discusses & signs Our Lady of the Angels: The Virgin of Guadalupe on the Walls of Los Angeles

Aug 31, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Ask ten people who have lived here twenty years to explain Los Angeles and you get ten confident answers that do not overlap anywhere. That is the condition of the place — everyone is an expert on the two square miles they know and a tourist everywhere else. Long-form reporting on this city draws a specific reader: the person who keeps a mental list of the neighborhoods they have not understood yet, who reads about a street they have driven a thousand times and finds out what was happening on it. A Monday-night talk pulls that reader out of the house at the start of a workweek, which is a real filter — the people who show up on a Monday are the ones who actually care. Expect long questions from the audience and longer answers. Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookstore, holding down Colorado Boulevard since 1894. A Monday, 7:00pm, at the very end of August. Ticketed.

This Happened

Joseph Fink, in conversation with Mara Wilson, discusses & signs The Nudge: A Psychological Thriller

Sep 1, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Some people drive home in the dark with a podcast in their ears and find a desert town that does not exist more comforting than the one they actually live in. That listener has usually never met another one in person. The voice has been in their head for a decade — across a move, a bad year, a commute they otherwise could not have survived — and it has always been a solitary arrangement, headphones and a highway. Which is the strange thing about a night like this: the person whose sentences you have been carrying around turns out to be a guy standing at a podium in a bookstore, taking questions, slightly amused. The room fills with people who all have the same reference points and have never once been able to use them out loud. Southern California's oldest independent bookstore has hosted this exact kind of gathering since 1894, long before anyone called it a fandom. Ticketed, 7:00pm, the first Tuesday in September. Go alone if you have to. You will not be the only one who did.

This Happened

Diana Giovinnazo, in conversation with J. Ryan Stradal, discusses & signs Daughters of Naples

Aug 25, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Somewhere in a drawer there is a photograph of a woman nobody living can name. She is standing in front of a building in a country your family left, and the story that went with her died with whoever last told it. Second and third generations carry that gap around quietly — a surname they cannot pronounce the old way, a recipe with a step missing, a grandmother who answered questions in a language that ran out before the answers did. Historical fiction set in the place your people came from does something a family tree cannot: it puts weather and noise and a wet street back around the photograph. Readers who come to a Tuesday-night talk for this are rarely casual about it. They bring their own version of the drawer. Free-flowing question sessions here tend to turn into people telling their own family stories to a stranger with a microphone, which is the entire point. Tickets required; the talk begins at 7:00pm on the 25th. Bring your version of the drawer. Somebody there will want to hear about her.

This Happened

April Dávila, in conversation with Lian Dolan, discusses & signs Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less

Aug 17, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

The manuscript is in a folder you have stopped opening. Not because the idea died — the idea is fine, the idea wakes you up sometimes — but because sitting down with it has started to feel like walking into a room where someone is waiting to tell you what is wrong with you. So you do not sit down. You reorganize your desk instead. You read about writing. Months go by, and the not-writing becomes its own heavy thing you carry into every conversation where somebody asks how the book is going. A Monday night talk about the mechanics of getting out of your own way is not a productivity seminar; it is closer to a room full of people admitting the same private failure at the same time, which is the only condition under which anyone actually starts again. It is free, which matters — nobody has to justify the cost of showing up to something they are not sure they deserve. It costs nothing and starts at 7:00pm on Monday the 17th. The folder is still sitting in your drawer.

This Happened

Olivie Blake, in conversation with Amy Tintera, discusses & signs Dreamland

Aug 11, 2026 TBA Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Most people who love these books have only ever loved them alone. At 1am, thumb on a screen, three chapters past the point where sleep was still an option, with nobody in the house who would understand why you are crying about a fictional academic. The fandom lives online because that is where it was born, and there is a specific hunger that builds in a person who has spent years talking about a story only to strangers with usernames. Then you walk into a room in Pasadena on a Tuesday night and forty of those strangers have faces. They brought their annotated copies. The tabs are color-coded, and somebody two rows up has the same tab system you thought you invented. The oldest independent bookstore in Southern California has been putting authors in front of readers here since 1894, which means the shelves behind the folding chairs have watched a hundred and thirty years of exactly this: people finding out their private thing is a shared thing. Doors at 7:00pm on Tuesday, August 11. Bring the copy with the tabs in it.

This Happened

James Queally, in conversation with Tod Goldberg, discusses & signs Surviving the Lie: A Russell Avery Novel

Aug 18, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Everybody in Los Angeles has a version of the city they think is the real one, and almost nobody's version includes the 3am parts — the watch commander's log, the press conference nobody attended, the case that got two paragraphs and then nothing. Crime fiction written by somebody who actually worked that beat reads differently than crime fiction written by somebody who researched it, and the readers who can tell the difference tend to be a little obsessive about it. They will drive across the county for a writer who gets the procedural details right. A Tuesday night in a bookstore is where that crowd surfaces: retired detectives arguing with novelists, court reporters, a couple of people who just love a good LA noir and want to hear how the sausage is made. Free entry, which keeps it the kind of room where people ask real questions instead of performing. Southern California's oldest independent bookstore, in business since 1894. Free entry, 7:00pm, Tuesday the 18th. Come with a question you actually want answered.

This Happened

Vroman's Fiction Reading Group

Aug 26, 2026 Free Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorad…

Finishing a novel that undoes you and having nobody to tell is its own small grief. You text one friend who has not read it. You consider writing a review you will never post. The feeling has nowhere to go, so it goes flat, and by the time somebody finally does read the thing you have lost the exact shape of what you wanted to say about it. A standing reading group quietly solves a problem most readers never name out loud: it guarantees that on a set evening there will be a room of people who have been inside the same book at the same time, and who will argue with you about the ending. There is no audition and no backlog you were supposed to have finished years ago — there is the current title and whatever you thought of it. The store itself has anchored Colorado Boulevard since 1894, which is a long time to have been handing strangers the same book and letting them fight about it. Free, 7:00pm, Wednesday the 26th. Check the store's event page for the month's title before you come.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

Comedy Heights at Twiggs Coffee Roasters

Weekly

35 Gathering

2 days away

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Comedy Heights at Twiggs Coffee Roasters

Every Saturday · Next Oct 10 Twiggs Coffee Roasters, 4590 Park …

Some of the best comedy in this city happens in the back of a coffee shop with about a hundred chairs in it, and it costs nothing, and that combination has confused people for years. No cover. No drink minimum. No corporate anything. Just a room, a mic, and comics who keep coming back to University Heights because the audience is real and the booking is better than a free show has any right to be. Some weeks it is a rotating lineup of working comedians. Some weeks it is a marathon with a headliner closing it out. The alumni list is long enough that on any given night you might be sitting in the room for someone's breakthrough set — a thing you only recognize much later. Twiggs on Park Blvd, Saturday nights at 8. Tips are encouraged and the bar takes cash. Get there early, because the back room fills. Bring the friend who claims they never laugh at stand-up anymore.

Pasadena Fall Festival 2026 — Victory Park

Coming Soon

16 days away

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Pasadena Fall Festival 2026 — Victory Park

Oct 24, 2026 Victory Park, 2575 Paloma St, Pasa…

The costume gets worn once. You spent three weeks on it, or forty dollars and a lot of regret on it, and then Halloween lands on a weeknight and the whole thing is over in ninety minutes of doorbells. This is the pressure valve for that — an afternoon in a park where the costume gets a second outing and an actual audience. Carnival games, a costume contest, free food, three hours on a Saturday in late October when the light in Pasadena goes gold early and every kid in the neighbourhood is already in character. It is small on purpose and it is free, which means the crowd is the people who live within a mile of Victory Park rather than anyone who bought a ticket. Worth knowing if you are bringing someone small: three to six in the afternoon means the whole thing happens in daylight and finishes before dinner, which is a very different proposition from a night event with a tired four-year-old. It is also the version of Halloween that works for the adults who wanted the season without the horror. Saturday, October 24, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Free, all ages. Victory Park, 2575 Paloma Street.

Topanga Vintage Market — Woodland Hills Aug

Monthly

20 Gathering

17 days away

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Topanga Vintage Market — Woodland Hills Aug

Every last Sunday · Next Oct 25 $5-$10 admission Pierce College, Mason Avenue Parki…

Fourteen years is how long one buyer has been hunting one specific Bakelite something, and he will be back this month working the rows in order, because the entire hobby runs on the belief that somebody, somewhere, has the thing. Once a month the Pierce College lot fills with about a hundred and seventy dealers and the people who hunt them. Mid-century furniture. Denim with exactly the right wear. Costume jewelry, oddball signage, instruments somebody loved and somebody else is about to. The early crowd arrives at seven for first pick; the later crowd comes to talk to the dealers, which is its own reason to go. Parking is free, cash and Venmo both work, and after a few months the buyers half-know each other. Fourth Sunday of the month, out in Woodland Hills. The thing you cannot find online is exactly what the fourth Sunday is for.

Coming Soon

23 days away

USC Trojans vs Ohio State Buckeyes

Oct 31, 2026 $40+ Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 391…

Big Ten football was not supposed to happen at the Coliseum, and yet here comes Ohio State — one of the bluest bloods in the sport, scarlet and gray flooding into a stadium that has seen a century of history — for the kind of marquee nonconference-turned-conference clash that used to only happen in bowl games. USC under the peristyle on a fall Saturday is already one of the great American sports settings: the Trojan on his horse, the band's fanfare, eighty thousand people and the ghosts of a dozen Heisman winners. Add a genuine national heavyweight and it becomes appointment viewing. Saturday, October 31, 2026, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Tailgate in Exposition Park, get in early for the card stunts and Traveler's lap, and come watch two of college football's true giants collide in the cathedral of West Coast football on a Halloween night that will feel like a playoff game. A century of history is on the field and in the stands, and this is a Saturday you will be glad you did not watch from your couch.

Monthly

104 Gathering

27 days away

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La Jolla First Friday Art Walk 2026 — Monthly

Monthly · Next Nov 4 Free 920 Kline St, La Jolla, CA 92037

Once a month the light off the Pacific hits the gallery corridor at exactly the right hour, and everything hanging on those walls looks better than it has any right to. The format is self-guided, which is the point — you pick the route, set the pace, and let whatever you are standing in front of decide how long you stay. Galleries pour wine and put out snacks. Thumbprint on Kline Street is the unofficial anchor, and if you only have an hour, start there and let it carry you. More than 400 people turn out each month, which is enough to feel like a neighborhood showing up for itself and small enough that you will end up talking to a gallerist without planning to. The theme shifts month to month; the character does not. First Friday of every month, 4 to 7 PM. 920 Kline St, La Jolla. Free, with evening street parking on most blocks. Short enough to finish in an hour. Long enough to lose the whole evening to, if you let it.

Coming Soon

44 days away

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USC Trojans vs Maryland Terrapins

Nov 21, 2026 $35+ Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 391…

By late November a college football season has sorted the contenders from the pretenders, and every home game carries the weight of bowl positioning, senior day emotion, and a fan base doing playoff math in the stands. Maryland making the cross-country trip to the Coliseum is exactly the kind of Big Ten matchup that still feels novel out West — an East Coast program in the shadow of the peristyle, autumn light slanting through the arches, the Trojan Marching Band filling one of the sport's grandest old rooms. USC in November, with something still on the line, is a quintessential Los Angeles fall Saturday. Saturday, November 21, 2026, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Tailgate in Exposition Park among the museums and the rose garden, get in for the pregame pageantry, and come spend a crisp late-season afternoon in the cathedral of West Coast football while the games still matter and the stakes keep climbing. Come be part of a Coliseum Saturday while it still means absolutely everything.

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