Since I do so many book reviews here on the blog, I thought I would take a brief look back at my year in books:

Num­ber of books I read: 53. I think this is down a lit­tle from 2008. I’m hop­ing to read at least 75 books in 2010. On the flip side, I wrote four books and heav­ily revised another one, which I think is up from 2008. It all evens out in the end.

Gen­res I read: All types of fan­tasy and romance, spy thrillers, action-adventure books, west­erns … pretty much every­thing but non-fiction and sci­ence fic­tion (I’m not a huge fan of those genres).

Authors: I read lots of my old favorite authors (Don­ald E. West­lake, Robert B. Parker, Kres­ley Cole, Jeaniene Frost, Lee Child, etc.) and sev­eral new peo­ple too (Scott Lynch, Alex Bled­soe, Kris­tan Hig­gins, etc.). I’ll try any­body once.

Best reads of the year: I absolutely loved Smooth Talk­ing Stranger by Lisa Kley­pas; Gracel­ing by Kristin Cashore; and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Those are all books that I wish that I had writ­ten — they’re just that good. Hon­or­able men­tions go to The Lies of Locke Lam­ora by Scott Lynch and The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bled­soe, two epic fan­tasy nov­els that kept me turn­ing the pages (and surf­ing Ama­zon to find out when the sequels come out).

Sad­dest read of the year: Get Real by Don­ald E. West­lake because he passed away in 2008 and there prob­a­bly won’t be any more books by him (unless he had some­thing in the works prior to his death). I’ll miss West­lake and his clever sense of humor. Ditto for his alter ego writ­ing as Richard Stark. But luck­ily, he left me a lot of great books to re-read over the years.

Most frus­trat­ing read of the year: The Pro­fes­sional by Robert B. Parker. As much as I like the Spenser series, I’m get­ting a lit­tle tired of see­ing the same char­ac­ter over and over again — namely, the psy­cho, nympho woman who uses sex to get what she wants and isn’t too smart about it.

YA mania: I’d for­got­ten how good young adult books could be. But with every­one buzzing about titles like Gracel­ing by Kristin Cashore; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; and Vam­pire Acad­emy by Richelle Mead, I read sev­eral YA titles in 2009 — and some of them were among my top reads of the year. I’ll be read­ing more YA in 2010 — and maybe writ­ing one myself.

So there you have it. Some of my thoughts about the books I read in 2009.

What about you guys? What were some of your top reads in 2009? Share in the com­ments. And happy read­ing in 2010!