January 2022 TBR

Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today it’s time to look forwards in time once again to the next month’s TBR, and, somehow, we’re looking onward to January 2022.

2021 has been a very intense year for us, and I won’t be sorry to leave it behind. However, it was a very good reading year, and with it being so successful, I’m hoping for things to only look up again in the next twelve months.

Because I’m increased my reading goal for the coming year, I’ll be increasing how many books I’m aiming to read each month. I’m still going to give myself some free spaces to pick books as the month rolls around, but to begin with, for January I’m going to allocate seven titles, and go from there.

City of Brass
I was prompted to include this by an upcoming New Year Book Tag, thinking about books that I’ve had ready to read for ages but need to actually get around to doing so. With almost all of my books being packed up in storage at the moment (I still have access to my book trolley, which currently lives in my parent’s living room!), I’m relying heavily on my Kindle and Audible. I’ve got the audiobook downloaded on my phone, ready to go.

A Shadow in the Ember
There’s only so long you can avoid spoilers for, and I think I’m pushing my luck a bit here. If I don’t listen to this in January, I’ll have to just accept finding everything out before I open it! I can’t wait to read it, and I don’t know what’s taken me so long to get around to reading it, other than to say that with life being so up in the air, I haven’t had the brain space to commit. But it’s TIME.

Under the Whispering Door
I decided to bump this up my list a bit after seeing a First Lines Friday post about it, and falling absolutely in love with what I read. Here’s the synopsis:
“Welcome to Charon’s Crossing. The tea is hot, the scones are fresh and the dead are just passing through.
When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own sparsely attended funeral, Wallace is outraged. But he begins to suspect she’s right and he is in fact dead. Then when Hugo, owner of a most peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace reluctantly accepts the truth. 
Yet even in death, he refuses to abandon his life – even though Wallace spent all of it working, correcting colleagues and hectoring employees. He’d had no time for frivolities like fun and friends. But as Wallace drinks tea with Hugo and talks to his customers, he wonders if he was missing something. 
The feeling grows as he shares jokes with the resident ghost, manifests embarrassing footwear and notices the stars. So when he’s given one week to pass through the door to the other side, Wallace sets about living a lifetime in just seven days.“

City of Heavenly Fire
Ellie, Fiona and I made our way through a chunk of the Shadowhunters universe this year, but we all kind of ground to a stop when life got busy for all of us. We’re planning on making a start again from this month, and so hopefully we’ll be returning to Shadowhunter Saturdays as well!

Murder Isn’t Easy: The Forensics of Agatha Christie
My only planned non-fiction read for the month so far is this latest book by Carla Valentine. I’ve always been a big Agatha Christie fan, so I’m looking forward to diving into the world of the actual science behind her stories. Throughout the years I’ve gathered a collection of forensic knowledge, but there’s always more to learn.

I Know You Did It
The love Amy McCaw, author of Mina and the Undead, and I did a buddy read of It’s Behind You last year. Keen to scare ourselves a little bit more, we’ve decided to read I Know You Did It this January, which will hopefully be something we can manage to do semi-regularly, if we can work it around both of our busy lives.

Queenslayer (Spellslinger #5)
I’ve been working my way through the Spellslinger series and have absolutely fallen in love with the world, characters and stories. Queenslayer is book five, and although my review of book four isn’t live yet, you can’t find the rest of the reviews here:
Spellslinger – 1
Shadowblack – 2
Charmcaster – 3

So there we are! My final TBR post of the year. It’s been an interesting twelve months. See you on the other side.