 
 
Gah, of course I would be this late! But I’ve spent January of 2020 writing and revising so I forgive myself for waiting till nearly the end of January to talk about last year in reading.
For those of you, like me, who like to track your reading stats, Goodreads has a nifty feature that allows you to look back at the titles you’ve read. I made a conscious effort to include as many diverse reads as I could this year and I am satisfied I’ve made progress. I’d set a goal of 75 books but read 118 of them. When you consider that I wrote two romance shorts of 10k, revised a 95k manuscript and drafted 65k of a new book, all while working full time and raising an active family, I think I’ve done okay!
I’m not going to go through and count up each type of book I’ve read. If the curiosity moves you, you can always hit up my Goodreads author profile here. You might even be enticed to buy a copy of Hot Summer Nights: A Summer Romance Collection from the New Romance Cafe to read my story, “Mar y Sol” or you can preorder Heart’s Desire: A Contemporary Romance Collection from The New Romance Cafe, featuring my short romance, “Slant Rhyme.”
All proceeds from both collections go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.See what I did there? I’m getting better at marketing already!
As regards to my favorite books of 2019, I’m going to link to my Best Books of 2019 thread from Twitter because I think it does a fairly good job of summing up, in prompt format, the great books I’ve read this year. Are there books missing? Absolutely! I’ll add those honorary mentions below.
Some books simply didn’t fit any of the prompts but deserve mentioning. These would include, in no particular order:
Mangos and Mistletoes by Adrianna Herrera
Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin
In the Middle of Somewhere by Roan Parrish
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase
For Real by Alexis Hall (actually, the entire Spires series. And the Arden St. Ives Series. Yeah, pretty much anything he writes).
Winter Hours by Mary Oliver
The Craft of Love by EE Ottoman
Speak Low/Silverchest/The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips
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