The “Death by ARCs” Update #1: Quite the Reading Rollercoaster

Happy Saturday everyone! I hope your new year was great and that you have been enjoying 2020 so far. I decided to take a small break for a lot of December due to traveling, time with family, work and other things. But I hope to finally be back in the swing of things with blogging with this new year. I also decided that it was time for a kinda overdue update on my “Death by ARCs” pile which you can see right here from clear back in July of 2019. I’m going to show my stats on these books from that post and then include new ones that have come since that post. There’s a LOT to go through so let’s get going!

Total Books from the pile: 15

 

ARCs I Completed

Total ARCs completed:  7/16 or 43%

Looking at this percentage is actually really good and feels really good. While this pile of ARCs isn’t everything I’ve gone over this year, reading almost half of this pile is really good for me. But in this pile, only 2 books were between a 4 and 5 stars. They were Seven Deadly Shadows (got 4.5 stars) and The Bone Houses (which got 5 stars and the #1 spot for my favorite book of 2019). The rest of these were 3 stars and below. Luckily there are no 1 star books in this pile, but man some of these books (I’m looking at you A Thousand Fires)  were so disappointing. While I did overall like The Liars of Mariposa Island (which I reviewed in the last couple weeks) and There Will Come A Darkness (only got 3 stars), I didn’t have the best luck with finding more favorite books.

 

ARCs I DNF’d

Total Books DNF’d: 6/16 or 37%

This is such a bummer pile guys! I had some real high hopes for pretty much all of these. From their premise down to the hype, I wanted these to be new favorites. But sadly, all of these were ones I had to put down. From clunky writing, poor plat pacing, boring characters…the list varies on each one. I had the highest hopes for really loving The Light at the Bottom of the World, Eight Will Fall and The Ten Thousand Doors of January. But all of these ultimately bored me, became different books than what I thought they would be and then clunky writing with sketchy world building. These were just a few of the MANY ARCs I’ve DNF’d this year. I will say that the book I read the most of in this pile was Eight Will Fall, at reading over 50% which is pretty good. But I do feel good knowing that DNF’ing a book for me means that I can spend more time reading books I do enjoy. I don’t like everything and that’s okay.

 

ARCs Still to Read

Total ARCs to read: 3/16 or 18%

Luckily this pile is much smaller lol. I was in a scramble for the last of 2019 to finish as many 2019 ARCs, but managed to leave 2 to read this new year. I don’t know when I’ll get to these 3 but I sure hope soon enough. They’re still waiting on my shelves or Kindle to be read.

 

Current ARC Pile (to read)

Total ARC pile: 20 books

 

Well, wish me luck again lol. The pile has grown a lot since I posted in July and luckily, I’m under way with a few of them. Plus a few of these spoil a bit of my December book haul which will be up next week for sure. I do hope to get most of them done on time, except the ones that are 2019 books that are already late and maybe a couple early 2020 depending on how reading goes. But honestly, the whole ARC pile has created a huge reading roller coaster. The deadlines for the books got to me, which lead to my motivation tanking and the anxiety of all the things I had to read. Granted, I have been able to simply download a lot of these instead of getting them as requested ARCs but still, that’s a lot for one person lol. While the ARC pile has been hard, I do hope that this new year will be better and that I can find ways to stay motivated and come out on top 🙂

Have you gotten a lot of ARCs lately? Do you have any of these? If you’ve read any of them, what did you think of them? Let me know in the comments!