Supplemental Reading - January 2025
Our supplemental reading(+) recommendations for January's Dear Readers selection, March by Geraldine Brooks
A quick note from Cassie and Stevie:
Our “Supplemental Reading” is a way for our discourse on each month’s book to continue. We’ll be recommending other books that you may like if you liked the month’s pick; related books or articles by the author (or others); the source text that may have inspired the author; and movies, articles, and other media that feel appropriate to consume in light of the topic at hand. None of these lists are intended to be fully comprehensive, so please give us your suggestions as well.
Happy reading, Dear Readers!
xxoo, C+S
Our January 2025 book club pick—March by Geraldine Brooks—is a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women from Mr. March’s perspective. Published in 2005, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction1 in 2006. This is the first book of our year-long theme—REMIX: A Year of Reimagining and Retelling. Our full syllabus can be found here.
If you’re a Little Women stan, and need more LMA content:
Little Men or Jo’s Boys also by Louisa May Alcott
Check out this lovely article by Kate Jones about Little Women.
If you love a sister story:
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix, by Bethany C. Morrow (Here’s a great NPR interview where the author speaks to her inspiration and intention in writing this book.)
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (inspired by Little Women)
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (follows four sisters)
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (retelling of a Chinese folktale about two sisters)
This IG post also offers reads based on favorite March sister:
If you’re a historian at heart and want to hear from LMA’s black contemporaries:
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (This book was written as an autobiography by Jacobs, a mother and fugitive enslaved person, and published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for the author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent.)
If you’d like to get a bit nerdy (something we love to do on occasion):
American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. A million years ago, Stevie downloaded this book on her Kindle. It is non-fiction and centered on the much-lauded authors, including Louisa May Alcott, who inhabited Concord, Massachusetts in the 1800s. Wanting to dig into Transcendentalism and the writers of that time—known as the American renaissance—Stevie revisited the nearly forsaken download (proving her theory that bookshelves, digital or physical, are like a wine cellar). Stevie’s thoughts: “Truly fascinating. I flew through it. I had no idea the early- to mid-1800s were essentially high school meets the 1960s.”
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. Cassie came across this particular book when she was reading a recent post on ’s Substack (highly recommend subscribing). Tembe gives a long list of stellar recommendations, only a few of which we had already read. The other recs, including They Were Her Property, were immediately added to Cassie’s TBR.
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within Us Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard. This is another Tembe recommendation that sounds gruesome, weird, and provocative—and a necessary read to understand the atrocities of our country’s historical foundations.
If you’re craving screen time:
You have options for Little Women adaptations, and we highly recommend that you watch both of these because they are each endearing in their own right:
As a bonus rec and another byproduct of the aforementioned rabbit hole, Stevie has found Dickinson on Apple TV absolutely delightful; Louisa May Alcott makes a cameo or two.
If you want IRL recommendations to feed your mind:
In addition to Concord, Massachusetts, March inspired us to offer one more potential travel destination to add to your list: the Equal Justice Initiative, located in Montgomery, Alabama. Founded by Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson, EJI is home to the Legacy Museum, which covers the history of racial injustice in America from the slave trade through the murder of George Floyd. In addition to the museum, there is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. EJI’s three sites offer a transformative educational experience that most of us did not get in the classrooms we grew up in. In Stevie’s opinion, our country would be better off if every white American paid a visit to EJI.
If you’re excited about all of the above and have an expanded TBR and travel wish list, and just want a bite-sized bit of inspired poetry to go about your day, we leave you with this:
We actually didn’t know for what exactly the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded (besides fiction, that is), so we looked it up. According to the Pulitzer Prizes website, the Prize for Fiction is specifically “for distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”