State of the ARC is a monthly meme temporarily hosted by Sarah at All The Book Blog Names Are Taken meant to motivate you to finish up your long overdue ARCs (Advanced or Early Reader Copies). This is its original intention, while some bloggers have tweaked it a bit for their own purposes, such as just keeping ARCs in order by due dates. Or you can just be a hot mess like me who sometimes misses publishing dates (or ignores them altogether) and needs a way to stay organized on what has been read, reviewed, or is still begging for attention. Thank you to Evelina @ Avalinah’s Books for coming up with this super helpful monthly meme.

I finished June with 13 ARCs left to be read. 

If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that I didn’t do a lot of posting this month. I was caught up with dealing with health issues again, and decided to just put blog posts on pause until I was able to come back to it. Things are starting to feel like no matter what I do, I can’t catch a break. After dealing with successive injuries, I haven’t been able to fully recover from any of them since I can only treat one area at a time in PT, and the acute issue is what’s getting treated. I’m still going to physical therapy to heal from last month’s sciatica flare, but have been noticing an issue with the shoulder I had operated on. In the next week, I’ll be following up with some of my doctors, and have some concerns to address. In the meantime, I have spent the last week healing from a tongue biopsy. If you were ever wondering, it hurts. A LOT. And it involves getting novocain shots directly into the tongue. Which also hurts. A lot. I’m coming up on a week now, and the swelling has come down completely, although it’s still painful. Luckily, the oral pathologist is awesome and will be able to see me tomorrow, so fingers crossed for everything to be normal for the healing process and the biopsies.

I’m still slowly working my way through SVU (currently on season 8 thanks to my long-time crush on Christopher Meloni), along with binges of Superstore (on season 2) for when things get heavy. One of my besties told me it’s her escape show, and if you’ve ever worked in retail, you’ll probably get a bunch of laughs. In book news, since I still haven’t gotten relief from the fatigue, I haven’t gotten back to my better monthly stats. However, I made progress on my NG ARCs. Fortunately, being off the laptop for more than half the month meant that I didn’t request many books on NG, and this was the one of those great months where I read more than I requested, even if it was just a little bit more. It also meant that my ratio held steady at 97%, which I’m over the moon excited about.

The upcoming months have a lot of release dates, so I really need to be able to focus on some reading to stay ahead of that, and hopefully find the time to catch up on ARCs that have already released. I’m super excited about so many of these, and I have to admit there was one that I had already decided to request based on the title alone. Can you guess which one it is? 

There were some really enjoyable reads amongst my ARCs read in June, and while I had hoped for more, I think that what I did get done was a nice chunk and a good step down from last month’s total unread ARCs.

Here’s how this month went for my NG ARCs:

I got approved for 3 new books in June:

1. Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell
2. The Last Vampire by Romina Garber
3. Cammy Sitting Shiva by Cary Gitter

These are the ARCs that I read and reviewed, with links to my reviews:

1. A Charming Touch of Tarot by Melissa Holtz — see my review here.
2. The Wife’s Silence by Amanda McKinney — see my review here.
3. The Master Jeweler by Weina Dai Randel — see my review here.
4. No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding by Catherine Mack — see my review here.
5. Roommating by Meredith Schorr — see my review here.

Here are the ARCs I still have to read:

The hyperlinked title will open Goodreads in a new page.

1. School of Shards by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko | Amazon
2. The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club by Gloria Chao | Amazon
3. Totally and Completely Fine by Elissa Sussman | Amazon
4. The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Amazon
5. High Season by Katie Bishop | Amazon
6. The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan | Amazon
7. We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter | Amazon
8. Joy Moody is Out of Time by Kerryn Mayne | Amazon
9. Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher | Amazon
10. Cammy Sitting Shiva by Cary Gitter | Amazon
11. Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell | Amazon
12. The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer | Amazon
13. The Last Vampire by Romina Garber | Amazon

Which ARCs are you excited about this month? Do we have any in common? Have you already read any of these?