State of the ARC Meme

I rarely do meme’s (or it is memes?) on this blog because my reading is typically dictated by the book events or author interviews I’m scheduled to do. However, this seemed like a really easy one to join in on, and it appears other book bloggers are having so much fun doing these together, so I thought ‘what the hell’. Big thank you to Avalinah for inviting me to join, you can check out the rules of State of the ARC here on her blog.

My stats won’t be interesting, but potentially shocking to other bloggers. First and foremost, I’m not a member of Netgalley (nor do I intend to be, much to FictionFan’s chagrin, and others). I have about 62 physical books on my shelf right now that I need to read and review, all of them being sent to me by publishers or authors directly. I would say 98% of them were sent to me by the publishers, very few are sent by the author, mainly because my review policy is quite strict.

Anyway joining this meme means being a part of the goodreads group that picks a theme for each month, helping direct you to a particular kind of book to help whittle down your TBR (To Be Read) pile. In October, (not surprisingly) the theme ‘creeptober’ won out, so we had to read a scary/creepy/eerie book. I chose The Good People by Hannah Kent, which I then reviewed on-air of the CBC a few weeks ago (the audio file was lost, but I promise I did it!).  It was a great read for October, the atmosphere was uber creepy, but I found the book lagged a bit in the middle because the pacing wasn’t as tight as I would have liked it to be. Fans of historical fiction may be a bit more forgiving than I was though, so don’t strike this off your list if you liked Kent’s first novel Burial Rites, you’ll probably like this one too.

My TBR pile is only set to grow in the next month, as I’m searching for books to highlight in my gift-giving radio segment , so I’ve got a ton of stuff on the way. With that in mind, I might be too embarrassed to do another State of the ARC post for awhile, because  I know I’ll be ashamed of the growing numbers. In case you don’t hear from me again on this topic it’s because…I’m failing at it.