I’m taking part in a fun festive reading challenge from 28th November 2025 to 15th January 2026.

🪶Challenge
📗Choose any word that you find applicable to the festive season (e.g. WINTER, YULE, CHRISTMAS). Then read books whose titles or authors’ names start with each letter of that word (“a”, “the”, “an” and similar don’t count as the start of a title).
📗For more challenging letters like Q, X, Y, and Z, the letter only needs to appear somewhere in the book’s title or author’s name, not necessarily at the beginning.
📗One book per letter.

I want to play but I don’t want to over commit, so I’ve chosen a six letter word linked to the festive season.

I’ve chosen my six books from my TBR pile from 2024 and 2025. Two of the books have seasonal themes. The rest are just books I’m looking forward to reading.

I’m going to spell out WREATH using:

Six years after four family members died suspiciously of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods—elder, agoraphobic sister Constance; wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian; and eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine, or, Merricat—live together in pleasant isolation. Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic to guard the estate against intrusions from hostile villagers. But one day a stranger arrives—cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune—and manages to penetrate into their carefully shielded lives. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods, resulting in crisis, tragedy, and the revelation of a terrible secret.

In Anne Lamott’s wise and witty novel, the growing pains of motherhood are portrayed with rare humor and honesty. If Elizabeth Ferguson had her way, she’d spend her days savoring good books, cooking great meals, and waiting for the love of her life to walk in the door. But it’s not a man she’s waiting for, it’s her daughter, Rosie—her wild-haired, smart-mouthed, and wise-beyond-her-years alter ego. With Rosie around, the days aren’t quite so long, but Elizabeth can’t keep the realities of the world at bay, and try as she might, she can’t shield Rosie from its dangers or mysteries. As Rosie grows older and more curious, Elizabeth must find a way to nurture her extraordinary daughter—even if it means growing up herself.

In the midst of a dangerously dry season, national park ranger Anna Pigeon has been posted to Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast for a monotonous, twenty-one-day fire watch. But her boredom is short-lived, for this remote and marshy place is a breeding ground to more than just the imperilled Loggerhead turtle; it also spawns eccentricity and secrets, greed, suspicion… and murder.
A small plane crashes into the palmetto thickets nearby. Anna and her crew arrive in time to control the blaze, but too late to save the pilot and his passenger, Cumberland’s sole law enforcement ranger. When the cause of the ‘accident’ is determined to be sabotage, Anna becomes entangled in an investigation that threatens to upset the very delicate balance of this fragile ecological preserve. For she is precariously close to exposing dark, clandestine crimes, both old and new, that someone has worked very diligently to conceal… and which makes Anna Pigeon the most endangered creature on the island.

When Aidan Lloyd’s bleak funeral is followed by a nocturnal ritual in the fog, it becomes all too clear that Aidan, son of a wealthy farmer, will not be resting in peace. 
Aidan’s hidden history has reignited an old feud, and a rural tradition begins to display its sinister side.
It’s already a fraught time for Merrily Watkins, her future threatened by a bishop committed to restricting her role as diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Suddenly there are events she can’t talk about as she and her daughter Jane find themselves potentially on the wrong side of the law.
In the city of Hereford, DI Frannie Bliss, investigating a shooting, must confront the apparent growth of organised crime, also contaminating the countryside.
On the Welsh border, the old ways are at war with the modern world. As the days shorten and the fog gives way to ice and snow, a savage killing draws Merrily Watkins into a conflict centred on one of Britain’s most famous medieval churches, its walls laden with ancient symbolism.

You’d never guess Lottie Jones had skeletons in her closet.
She’s lived in town for decades now. She’s getting older. She lives for the simple pleasures of weekly bingo games at church, and gossiping with her friends about their children’s love lives.
But when investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past, and specifically about her connection to numerous unsolved murders, well, Lottie just can’t have that.

She’s making a list, she’s checking it twice…
Jessica Williams loves Christmas: the food, the drink, the fairy lights, the opportunities to take out all the miserable people who ruin the festive season for others. And what better cover for her murderous intentions than taking a job as Mrs Claus at the Ellsbury Christmas Market grotto? After all, who would possibly think Mrs Claus could stab a man through the eye with a Phillips-head screwdriver?
Fearne Dixon hates Christmas. As the long-suffering wife of the Ellsbury Christmas Market’s manager, she’s sick to the back teeth of it and it’s still only November. But then the bodies start piling up, an old rival arrives back in her life, and Fearne reaches breaking point.
When the lives of the two women collide, who will end up on the Naughty List?