Even in an annus horribilis, it turns out, spring is around the corner here in the San Gabriel Valley — it’s in the air today — and spring in Pasadena is when the books and book festivals bloom like the daffodils in my garden are.

Here comes One City, One Story, and the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors, and LitFest in the Dena, as they always do, and there’s something reassuring about that annual fact still being annual even when the going gets tough, with the Eaton fire burning down half the houses in Altadena, and the mean chaos emanating out of Washington, D.C. making us properly worry for the future of our very nation.

More on the get-togethers in a bit.

Because I got a book in the mail the other day by Megan Marshall, two years ahead of me in the Pasadena schools — that famous Blair High class of ‘71, which included Councilman Rick Cole, attorney Chris Sutton, revolutionary Jonathan Jackson — who has been a New Englander ever since graduation. Megan’s grandparents lived in Altadena, and she feels our pain from across the country: “I’m writing this from up in Belmont, Mass.,” Megan writes in a note tucked into the book, “where a fresh blanket of snow seems to mock the hot hell in that place so dear to so many hearts.”

Megan won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for her “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” is a leading scholar of the transcendentalists and so fittingly is a professor at Emerson College. Having written three acclaimed biographies, her touching, profound new book is “After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.” Reading it I discovered what I suppose should be a given but is something I’d never considered: Researching and then writing about other people’s lives of long ago can have a deep effect on the biographer’s own. Plus, you become something of a detective from the future. There is a stunning story in Megan’s introduction about, for complex reasons, being given the chance to look into the coffin of Una Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s daughter, “whose puckish disposition as a girl had been grafted by her father onto little Pearl, Hester Prynne’s willful out-of-wedlock daughter in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Una died in England in 1877, age 33, after an illness during which her hair was said to have turned white.

Megan saw Una’s remains in 2006. Her hair was “a deep rusty red.”

If you are a reader of biographies, you really want to read “After Lives.” But there’s also a ton of San Gabriel Valley history here, as well as a surprising chapter on living in Kyoto, and great insight into what writing a single exceedingly famous poem — “One Art” — had on the legacy of Megan’s Harvard teacher Elizabeth Bishop, subject of Megan’s biography “A Miracle for Breakfast.” What a marvel this book is.

Wednesday at random

Talk about your marvelous books: How lucky we are to have South Pasadena novelist Percival Everett — after a really long career, “suddenly” the hottest fiction writer in America — coming to the Pasadena Library’s annual One City, One Story celebration to talk about his extraordinary “James,” winner of the National Book Award for fiction. Everett will be in conversation about his first-person retelling of the life of Jim from “Huckleberry Finn,” with its voice of James right from the book’s already famous first line, as he watches Huck and Tom Sawyer, up to no good: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” There are many events surrounding OCOS, with the main attraction Saturday, March 15 at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd. Interpretive dance at 1:30 p.m.; conversation at 2 p.m.

Then Saturday, March 22 it’s the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors — co-founded by dear Elsie Sadler, who died early this month, aged 97 — headlined this year by Rachel Khong and her novel “Real Americans.” As ever, this wonderful, all-day event is technically sold out, but there’s a waiting list at pasadenaliteraryalliance.org, or hit up a generous table-buying friend!

Then May 3 and 4 it’s LitFest, litfestinthedena.org, miraculously still at the fire-adjacent Mountain View Mausoleum in Altadena, this year with a theme: “Books That Teach Us About Character.” More on that closer to May, but I love the insight from Ursula K. LeGuin: “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel ... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com