Winter TBR #TopTenTuesday
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl is “Books on My Winter 2024-2025 TBR.”
For the new year, I’m reworking how I keep my To Be Read list. I’ve never had one that worked well for me. In the past, I threw books into Goodreads. My TBR, there, has 805 books on it — which renders it completely useless as a place to find my next book. In 2024, I tried keeping a spreadsheet, but it quickly grew overwhelming as well.
Clearly, I suck at this. Part of me wants to preserve the illusion that I can read ALL THE BOOKS. But another part of me would like the pleasure of reading to feel a little more orderly and a little less chaotic. Fortunately, I found some help at The Bookish Elf: How to Create a TBR List that You’ll Actually Stick To.
By artistsncoffeeshops. Shared with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 License.
I’ve also had a goal for more than a year to move from Goodreads (owned by Amazon) to The StoryGraph (owned by a black woman).
So, I’m setting up my TBR on StoryGraph and following some of the advice from The Bookish Elf article. I will limit my TBR list to 50 books, use an Up Next list of 5 or fewer books, and periodically reset the whole list and start from scratch.
I started yesterday and didn’t finish, but I learned enough to make a decent guess at what I’ll read in the next three months.
Book Club Books
The Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group will meet three times this winter. Here are the books we’ll discuss:
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
- Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
- The Guncle by Steven Rowley
Wintery Books
As I went through the books in my spreadsheet, yesterday, I discovered three that I completely forgot but seem perfect for this time of year.
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. Martha Ballard was (in real-life) an 18th-century midwife. She kept diaries that are valuable resources to historians of colonial America. In this novel, she turns her attention to detail to a mystery. How and why was a man frozen into the river?
The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear. The author of the Maisie Dobbs series introduces a new sleuth in this book. Elinor White was a shadowy figure in both wars. Her seclusion in rural Kent is interrupted by a delightful neighbor child. Her quiet retirement is disturbed when that child’s family is targeted by a powerful crime family. I’m inferring the winter theme from the snowy cover.
Practice by Rosalind Brown. This novel covers one day (late in January) in the life of a student working to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
What Libby Provides
My other four books will be delivered at the whims of Libby, the library app. In my process of reworking my TBR, I have whittled my Holds list from an overwhelming 23 books to 11. I gave up on some of those books entirely and put others on my new TBR in StoryGraph to make a later appearance in Libby.
I finished a book yesterday, so I would love for one of these books to be available right now. In the last three weeks, while I was reading A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis and couldn’t take on another book, I can’t count how many times I punched the “Deliver Later” button. Now, when I want a book to be delivered, my notifications are bare.
Here are the four books that I’m most rooting to show up today:
- Make My Wish Come True by Alyson Derrick and Rachael Lippincott. That would mean I could read another Christmas book before Christmas.
- The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. I think I’m remembering how Station Eleven began with wintery scenes, which has somehow put me in the mood for another book by the same author.
- Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude by Stephanie Rosenbloom seems like a cozy memoir for the season.
- The London House by Katherine Reay. This is a dual timeline novel centered on a World War II mystery that might hit the spot.
How about you? What are you looking forward to reading this winter?