December Reading Wrap Up & Shelly's Top 10 of 2012

I think that this post will be a December Wrap Up as well and just a general post about how my year in reading went.  I actually manged to get a lot of reading done this month!

I think that this may be one of this biggest months I have had so far and that's largely due to my 2 week Christmas break.  I did exceed my reading goal for the year though.  I only had 100 books on my Goodreads 2012 Challenge and when I hit that I predicted that I would hit 130 and I ended the year with 134, so I called that one pretty good.  I set my Goodreads 2013 Challenge goal at 125 so we'll see how that goes.

I wanted to do this at the end of the year and it's been SUPER hard to pick my favorites, but here goes.  And I want to point out that these are NOT in any sort of order, that would be WAY too hard!  Oh, and these are not all books that were released in 2012, they are just top picks of the 134 books I read this year.

Shelly's top 10 books of 2012

• Slammed / Point of Retreat by Colleen Hoover
• City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare
• Tortured Spirits by Gregory Lamberson
• Butterfly by Kathryn Harvey
• Hopeless by Colleen Hoover
• Lancaster House / Middle Aisle by Taylor Dean
• Gabriels's Inferno / Gabriel's Rapture by Sylvain Reynard
• South of Bixby Bridge by Ryan Winfield
• Bared to You / Reflected in You by Sylvia Day
• Thoughtless / Effortless by S.C. Stephens
• Love Unscripted / Love Unrehearsed by Tina Reber

Ok, I added a couple extra!  If there were 2 in the series and I liked them equally as much then I had to put them together.  I am curious which of these books you have read and what you thought about them.  Would you have added them to your Top 10 List?

I have been keeping my books in boxes since we moved to this house 5.5 years ago and I decided that it was time to get some shelves for them, especially since I have amassed quite a nice collection of Signed book in the past few months.  I got a Target GC for Christmas and I promptly went and bought 2 shelves, but I think I am going to need at least one more.  I still have probably 3 big boxes of books that have been in my garage since we moved here and I am certain that those books will fill another shelf!

Here is a little tour of my newly filled shelves, keep in mind that for the most part there is no rhyme or reason to how these are organized!

Here are a few of my favorite shelves

On the left you see a couple of my favorite series, I don't have them all because when I got my kindle I stopped buying print books for awhile.  Eventually I will pick them all up so I have the completed collections.  On the right on the top are a couple more favorites and you can see that I did stick Gone Girl up there and it's NOT in my favorites, in fact I am going to sell that one on Amazon just as soon as I take the time to list it!  On the second shelf is where I have all my author signed books.  There are a few on there that aren't signed, but they go with books that are signed so they are staying there!  Yes, I do have 3 copies of The Book of Paul and 2 of those are signed (one is a newer edition that I have a review quote in!), the 3rd (or 1st, in this case) is my review copy and I plan to do a give away for that in the future.  I love that my books finally have a home and that I can look at them all the time!

I want to do a yearly wrap up, but I think I will do that when I hit my one year blog anniversary in a couple months.  I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that your New Year is starting off well.

Happy Reading!