Winter 2022 TBR: 10 Books I Hope to Read

Happy Tuesday, y’all! Can you believe that winter starts in a week? Honestly, I don’t mind winter. Why? Because it means I get to stay inside and read, and no one will be upset with me. This week’s TTT from Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl is our Winter 2022 TBR.

How did my Autumn TBR go? I did pretty well, if I do say so myself. Out of the ten books I listed, I finished six, and one was a DNF. I hope that my Winter TBR is as successful, if not more so. How did your last seasonal TBR work out for you? Did you read all ten books you listed?

I was a bit stumped on what books I want to read in the coming months until I looked at my NetGalley. Then a wonderful idea popped into my head. For the first three months of 2022, I currently have five ARCs that I need to read. So that makes up half of the required ten. And then, I remembered seeing a reading challenge from Books & Lala that I wanted to participate in, adding three more books. That left me with two books, so I decided to play with the random function on Goodreads to sort my TBR and found the last two books for the list. The best part is that I have all ten books, so I can read them whenever I want!

Now without further ado, here’s my Winter 2022 TBR!

Book 1: Up to No Gouda by Linda Reilly

Back in Balsam Dell to heal after the death of her husband, Carly Hale is finally pursuing her lifelong dream—opening Carly’s Grilled Cheese Eatery. After only five months, business is booming as Vermont vacationers and townspeople alike flock to lunch on her Party Havartis and other grilled cheese concoctions. All but Lyle Bagley, Carly’s one-time high school boyfriend and town bully, who just bought the building that houses her eatery and wants Carly out. After a muenster of a fight, Carly’s forced to put her nose to the rind and find a solution to keep her business afloat.

That is…until Lyle is discovered dead behind the dumpster of Carly’s shop, and one of her employees becomes the prime suspect. In order to save her eatery and prove her friend’s innocence, Carly must sleuth out the killer before she’s the one who gets grilled.

Book 2: The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont

“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman. It’s a particular feeling, the urge to murder. First comes rage, larger than any you’ve ever imagined. It takes over your body so completely, it’s like a divine force, grabbing hold of your will, your limbs, your psyche. It conveys a strength you never knew you possessed. Your hands, harmless until now, rise up to squeeze another person’s life away. There’s a joy to it. In retrospect, it’s frightening, but I daresay in the moment, it feels sweet. The way justice feels sweet.”

So begins The Christie Affair, told from the point of view of Miss Nan O’Dea, a fictional character but based on someone real. In 1925, she infiltrated the wealthy, rarified world of author Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie. A world of London townhomes, country houses, shooting parties, and tennis matches. Nan O’Dea became Archie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted wife. In every way, she became a part of their world–first, both Christies. Then, just Archie.

The question is, why?

And what did it have to do with the mysterious eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing?

The answer takes you back time, to Ireland, to a young girl in love, to a time before The Great War. To a star-crossed couple who were destined to be together–until war and pandemic and shameful secrets tore them apart.

What makes a woman desperate enough to destroy another woman’s marriage?
What makes someone vengeful enough to hatch a plot years in the making?
And what drives someone to murder?

Book 3: Put Out to Pasture by Amanda Flower

There’s fowl play afoot on the farm.

Shiloh Bellamy has saved her family’s farm from financial ruin—but now what? She’s barely scraping by on the farm’s new organic business model, and the fall festival she organized to drum up business comes to a screeching halt when the body of a prominent townswoman is discovered underneath a scarecrow in a nearby field. Worst of all, the evidence points to Shiloh’s childhood best friend, Kristy, as the prime suspect.

Between cooking up delicious treats made with her farm’s produce, convincing her cantankerous father to let her do things her own way, and dealing with a newcomer in town who could be serious competition for her customers, Shiloh doesn’t have time to wade into a murder investigation. But with a killer on the loose and suspicious activity circling closer and closer to Shiloh and the people she loves, she realizes there’s nothing to do but roll up her sleeves and get down to the dirty work of finding the killer and clearing Kristy’s name once and for all.

Book 3: Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall

2017

When Angela Creighton discovers a mysterious letter containing a life-shattering confession in a stack of forgotten mail, she is determined to find the intended recipient. Her search takes her back to the 1970s when a group of daring women operated an illegal underground abortion network in Toronto known only by its whispered code name: Jane…

1971

As a teenager, Dr. Evelyn Taylor was sent to a home for “fallen” women where she was forced to give up her baby for adoption—a trauma she has never recovered from. Despite harrowing police raids and the constant threat of arrest, she joins the Jane Network as an abortion provider, determined to give other women the choice she never had.

1980

After discovering a shocking secret about her family history, twenty-year-old Nancy Mitchell begins to question everything she has ever known. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she feels like she has no one to turn to for help. Grappling with her decision, she locates “Jane” and finds a place of her own alongside Dr. Taylor within the network’s ranks, but she can never escape the lies that haunt her.

Book 5: Gridiron Girl by Tamara Girardi

Julia Medina, dubbed Jules by her closest friends, wants to be the new starting quarterback of Iron Valley High School’s football team, and no one is going to stand in her way. That is—until her boyfriend, Owen Malone, steps up to the challenge. Wanting to maintain her relationship with her boyfriend, Jules is torn. But while Owen is in her heart, football is in her blood.

Once the idea takes root to quit her championship volleyball team and join the leagues of Iron Valley’s toughest teenage boys, there’s no stopping Jules from pursuing her dream. In her mind, expectations that the position will go to a male player have gone on long enough. Although her decision creates controversy among the booster parents, school coaches, family members, and team members, Jules holds strong in her beliefs.

Which is good—because when parents hear that Jules plans to participate in overnight pre-season camp with a staff of male coaches and eighty high school boys, her tryout is threatened more than ever before. Yet, nobody can deny Jules’ skills. As the youngest sister of three former high school quarterbacks, Jules knows the game. She knows what it takes to outsmart opponents, and she’s not about to let anyone count her out for being a girl.

But as the competition intensifies, Jules must choose what she wants more—to embrace girl power and lead her team on the field or be a girlfriend on the sidelines.

Book 6: When You Look Like Us by Pamela N. Harris

When you look like us—brown skin, brown eyes, black braids or fades—people think you’re trouble. No one looks twice at a missing black girl from the projects because she must’ve brought whatever happened to her upon herself. I, Jay Murphy, can admit that, for a minute, I thought my sister, Nicole, got too caught up with her boyfriend—a drug dealer—and his friends.

But she’s been gone too long now.

If I hadn’t hung up on her that night, she’d be spending time with our grandma. If I was a better brother, she’d be finishing senior year instead of being another name on a missing persons list. It’s time to step up and do what the Newport News police department won’t.

Nic, I’m bringing you home.

Book 7: Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; she’s a revolutionary architect to the design mavens, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Book 8: The House Girl by Tara Conklin

Lynnhurst, Virginia, 1852. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run away from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell.

New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: finding the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Is it through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy rocking the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine’s – if Lina can locate one – would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit. While following the runaway house girl’s faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina’s mother die? And why will he never speak to her?

Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful, and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.

Book 9: Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey

Annie is twenty-seven years old, single, and obsessed with romantic comedies (she and her mother watched them religiously before her mom died). Her dating life is limited by the expectations she’s formed from these movies. She is not as open to new experiences as she might be because she’s waiting for her Tom Hanks–i.e., a guy she’ll find in the perfect, meet-cute romantic comedy way. When Annie does finally meet her perfect match, it’s not quite in the way she expected, and she’s forced to reckon with the walls she’s built around herself over the years.

Book 10: Knot the Usual Suspects by Molly MacRae

It’s time for Handmade Blue Plum, an annual arts and crafts fair, and Kath and her knitting group TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Fiber) plan to kick off the festivities with a yarn bombing. But they’re not the only ones needling Blue Plum. Bagpiper and former resident Hugh McPhee had just returned after a long absence, yet his reception is anything but cozy. The morning after his arrival, he’s found dead in full piper’s regalia.

Although shaken, Kath and her knitting group go forward with their yarn installation—only to hit a deadly snag. Now, with the help of Geneva, the ghost who haunts her shop, Kath and TGIF need to unravel the mystery before someone else gets kilt!

And that concludes my Winter 2022 TBR! I know that there are a couple of Agatha Christie books I’ll be reading this winter, but I’m unsure yet. Why? Because the Read Christie 2022 Challenge hasn’t been announced quite yet. And if my reading keeps up as it has recently, I’ll be reading more books than these. Why do I say that? Because in the past week, I’ve completed four books. The perks of the job I have, and the shift I work, we’re slow so that I can read! Yay!

What books are on your seasonal TBR this time around? I would love to know!

Looking for some more ideas to read? Check out my monthly reading wrap-ups.