Reading Roundup: Goodbye year, hello books!

This two weeks went by way too fast for my liking, but thank God I didn’t have more days off because I ate like the world was ending, seriously, I’m afraid to put on non-elastic pants because I have a feeling they won’t fit!

Anyway, I had a lovely time spending Christmas with my parents, I had an embarrassing mountain biking accident, I won’t go into details but it involved what I think was a deer but it might have been a leaf, poison oak and my face. You can fill in the rest if you want (at least it was my face and not my butt, like the last time). But above all I read a lot, shocking, I know!

2011, A Year in Books: The Best

This year I read a lot of books, I don’t have an exact number but I think it was over 200 books. Not all of them were published in 2011 and not all of them were good, some of them were huge disappointments (I’m looking at you Susan Elizabeth Phillips), but I think that overall it was a good year for romance novels.

I admit that most of the Contemporary Romances of the year were either mediocre or good, but just a few were truly outstanding, and only two books made my list:

Review: If You Hear Her by Shiloh Walker

Oh Shiloh Walker, you evil mastermind! What have you done to me?

I’m a huge fan of Ms. Walker’s work, especially her romantic suspense novels, but when I got this book I did it under the wrong impression. I don’t know why, but I thought this was one of her romantic suspense  stories with a bit of a paranormal touch. I think I was confusing the book with The Departed, her January release which was the book I was eagerly anticipating (and still am), so when I realized that this wasn’t it, I was a bit disappointed. The disappointment lasted about two seconds, the time it took for If You Hear Her to captivate me and make me forget that this wasn’t the book I originally wanted to read.