Books by-the-month: March

As March arrives, bringing with it the promise of early spring, Women's History Month, and the festive revelry of St. Patrick’s Day. The literary world offers us tales of renewal, strength, and history. This month, we celebrate not only the invigorating green of the season but also the empowering stories of women throughout history. 

 

Daylight is adding up, about three minutes more each day as March progresses, give or take. Spring hasn’t arrived yet, but the plane is circling the tarmac. Welcome back, light! This time of year is The Great Unclenching, for when the light returns, something unclenches in us all. 

 

March offers the perfect opportunity to dive into novels that inspire and enrich. Here’s a carefully curated list of books that will fill your days with literary joy, perfect for curling up with during those first glimpses of warmth.

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March Theme: Women’s History Month

Women are amazing. Good Gd how we hate them. Let's uplift them instead.

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 

Little Women remains one of the most beloved and enduring classics of all time. The story follows the March sisters—Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—through the trials and triumphs of their adolescence and early adulthood during the Civil War. 

 

There is a certain magic in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women that no film adaptation—no matter how lovingly crafted—can fully capture. The silver screen has given us many beautiful versions, from the golden glow of the 1933 and 1949 classics to the heart-wrenching performances of the 1994 and 2019 renditions, but nothing compares to the original novel, with its gorgeous prose, recognizable characters, effortless warmth, wisdom, and its deeply personal intimacy. 

 

Alcott doesn’t just tell the story of the March sisters—she invites us into their magical attic, lets us sit by the fire as Jo scribbles away long in to the night, as Meg dreams of simple, beautiful things, as Amy yearns for greatness, and as Beth’s quiet kindness radiates through the pages. The novel pulses with life, with all the small joys and sorrows that make up a girlhood, and it is this depth—this richness is what truly makes Little Women not just a beloved book, but one of the great literary classics in the canon.

 

For at its heart, Little Women is about the messy, bittersweet journey of growing up—about the triumphs and disappointments, the laughter and heartbreak that shape us into who we become. Who hasn’t felt Jo’s frustration as she cries, “I’m angry nearly every day of my life!”? Who hasn’t longed to leave their mark on the world, or wrestled with duty and desire when torn between home and ambition? 

 

The beauty of Alcott’s novel is that it allows space for all these contradictions, for the quiet, everyday struggles of being human, and it does so with prose that glows like candlelight—soft, illuminating, and endlessly comforting. So yes, watch the films (come on: the 1994 was so crucial to my teenage sexual awakening it is hard to express just HOW important 1994 Christian Bale was so almost every one of my teenage romantic choices for better and for worse), fall in love with the March sisters all over again—but to truly know them, to hear their thoughts and feel their dreams, there is no substitute for the novel itself.

2. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s masterpiece novella is a fever dream wrapped in the suffocating folds of Victorian domesticity. The protagonist, suffering from what is diagnosed as a “nervous condition,” is confined to a room in her home by her husband, where she becomes obsessed with the room's yellow wallpaper.

 

Written in 1892, the story explores the mental and physical confinement of women in the 19th century, it is a tale that simultaneously drones with claustrophobia and crackles with the desperation of a woman unraveling beneath the weight of total oppression.

From the very first lines, we are drawn into a world where the walls themselves seem to whisper, where the sickly yellow of the wallpaper morphs into a living, breathing tormentor. This is not just a tale of one woman’s descent into madness—it is a searing indictment of a society that silences and stifles, that mistakes a mind in turmoil for mere female "hysteria." Every creeping tendril of the wallpaper, every shadow shifting in the dim light, becomes a manifestation of our narrator’s struggle; her rebellion simmering beneath layers of repression until it spills over in a dizzying, mesmerizing climax.

 

What makes The Yellow Wallpaper so hauntingly unforgettable is its intimacy—the way Gilman locks us inside the narrator’s fractured psyche, forcing us to see the world as she does, to feel her isolation as palpably as the stale air of her sickroom. The language is hypnotic, looping and circling like the patterns on the cursed wallpaper itself, mirroring the slow dissolution of self that takes place within those four walls. 

 

And when, at last, the narrator succumbs to the madness that has been tightening its grip around her soul, we are left breathless, horrified, yet strangely exhilarated. Gilman doesn’t just tell a story; she drags us into the heart of a nightmare that feels all too real: a cautionary tale that still resonates fiercely today.

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March Theme: St. Patrick’s Day

There are too many exquisite Irish novels, plays and collections of poetry to even begin to narrow them down. From classics such as Dubliners, Star of the Sea and The Country Girls, to contemporary classics like Angela’s Ashes, there is nothing quite like an Irish writer talking about LIFE. 

 

3. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, what better choice than Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, a heartbreaking yet darkly humorous look at the author’s impoverished childhood in 20th-century Ireland. But Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is not just a memoir—it’s a symphony of sorrow and resilience that transforms even the bleakest of childhoods into something fiercely beautiful. With prose that sings like an Irish ballad—both mournful and full of unexpected humor—McCourt paints a portrait of Limerick that is as rain-soaked and poverty-stricken as it is brimming with life.

Every page pulses with the raw, unfiltered voice of a boy who endures hunger, loss, and shame, yet somehow never loses his wide-eyed wonder at the world. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” he begins, and from that moment, we are swept into a story whose power lies in its stark refusal to submit to self pity or to sentimentality; in its ability to find poetry in the gutters and grace in the struggle. It is not just a memoir—it is a testament to survival, to storytelling, and to the indomitable spirit of those who dare to dream beyond their circumstances.

 

 

4. Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920. It has been called one of the most important works of Modernist literature. No other book captures the soul of Dublin with such ferocity and tenderness, stitching together the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904, with a depth and complexity that transforms the ordinary into the epic. To read Ulysses is to walk the streets of Dublin in 1904, to feel the rain on your face, to hear the chatter of pub-goers and the distant tolling of church bells, to live inside the thoughts of characters.

 

James Joyce’s Ulysses is not just the crown jewel of Irish literature—it is its beating heart, its wildest dream, its most defiant and dazzling creation.  Joyce hammered a job on the novel so complete that he became a category unto himself. This is a novel that dares to contain multitudes—history and myth, comedy and heartbreak, the sacred and the profane—all flowing together in an intoxicating stream of consciousness that changed literature forever.

Every literary style was mist to his grill, as he might have said, and his plotting, if such it can be called - two men who take all day to meet each other - paved the way for, among others, Samuel Beckett. 

Above all he taught every writer the importance of naturalistic dialogue; with his fine tenor voice Joyce knew better than most that we read not with the eye but with the ear.

And yet, Ulysses is more than just an ode to Dublin—it is the very soul of Irish literary ambition; the book that shattered conventions and redefined what a novel could be. Joyce takes the English language, that instrument of colonial rule, and bends it to his will, infusing it with the rhythms of Irish speech, the poetry of everyday thought, the sheer audacity of a mind unchained. It is a book that demands everything from its reader, but in return, it gives back a universe— in which a single day can contain all of human existence. 

 

“Yes I said yes I will Yes,” Molly Bloom declares in the novel’s final, breathtaking lines, and in that moment, Joyce doesn’t just conclude a masterpiece—he affirms life itself, in all its messiness, all its beauty, all its infinite possibility. 

 

If one book must stand as the pinnacle of the Irish literary canon, let it be Ulysses.

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March Theme: The Ides of March

With this addition, Julius Caesar rounds out the list perfectly, infusing the month of March with both the classic weight of Shakespearean tragedy and a timely nod to the historical moment that defines it.

5.  Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

March is synonymous with the ominous "Ides of March," and what better way to dive into the drama of fate, ambition, and betrayal than with William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar—the mighty general and leader of Rome—is on the verge of absolute power, but a group of conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius believes his rule will bring tyranny. While this ticking-time-bomb of a play is set in the heart of ancient Rome, it reads (and plays!) like "DC Noir" made popular on television in the 21st Century. It explores the tension between personal loyalty and political duty through the all-too-human lenses of loyalists and conspirators.

 

William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is so much more than "just "a history play—it is a timeless political thriller; a study of power, ambition, and the chaos that ensues when the line between patriotism and personal ambition blurs. And in 2025, as the world grapples with populist movements, political conspiracies, misinformation, high emotions and a desperate common man, the ever-present question of who truly wields power reveals that this classic feels more relevant than ever. 

 

The fickleness of the Roman crowd, swayed so easily from love to uncontrollable rage, mirrors the way modern public opinion shifts with a single headline or viral video. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” Cassius warns, and his words ring truer than ever in an era where leaders rise and fall within 24-hour news cycles at the whims of public perception. The senators, believing they act in Rome’s best interest, justify their actions with noble rhetoric, yet their violence only breeds more instability—a cautionary tale for any modern political upheaval.

 

Even more striking is the play’s exploration of the power of speech, leveraged emotions, and misinformation, something that resonates in an age dominated by social media and manipulated narratives. Mark Antony’s funeral oration is a masterclass in persuasion, as he subtly turns the crowd against the conspirators without ever directly condemning them: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” What follows is a perfect example of how a skilled orator can bend public sentiment to his will, a lesson we see played out daily in modern media and politics. Observe Damien Lewis deliver Marc Anthony's eulogy-as-political-excoriation, here:

 

 

 

The chaos that erupts in the wake of Caesar’s death, where reason is drowned out by outrage, echoes our contemporary political divisions as they spiral into violence, dis and misinformation, and violent power struggles. Shakespeare’s Rome is not so different from our world in 2025—ambition, manipulation, and the ever-looming question of who truly holds power remain as urgent and dangerous as ever.