I had an update come through for my Mint 19 computer, along with a few other updates.
The updates started ok but then seemed to be taking a long time, so I clicked on the details and it showed that the operation appeared to be stalled on one of the numerous Libreoffice file updates.
This occasional stalling during the Mint updates seems to be only happening on my Mint 19 computer and not on my main computer that has Mint 18.
There were a multitude of LibreOffice language updates.
I selected to cancel the updates and the update package continued on to a finish.
So I googled about getting rid of all the numerous language files in Libreoffice and one instrucrion said to redo the install of LibreOffice and during the install, drill into the menu and unselected the languages that you don't want to install.
Well, LibraOffice comes with Mint so I didn't have to manually install it and therefore there was no program file to do a manual install.
I went into Synaptic and searched for LibraOffice and it brought up a multitude of files. I scrooled down the list and uncheched any file that had to do with a language other than English. It was a
tedious process.
I just hope that when the next Mint update comes through for Libreoffice, that it doesn't try to re-installed all those unwanted language files.
I'm unable to confirm from where I am but I'd be very surprised if Synaptic doesn't have a select all option after filtering for Libreoffice. Then just unselect the base files and delete everything else.
You can't really blame a distro for including other languages. They want their distro to be available to everybody. Maybe you can blame them for the updater being slow although it could be the mirror used is slow.
I had a similar problem but with all Mint updates. There is a way to change the server we are connected to for updates. Intend to try that as a solution first.
The choices are listed with their speed. Selected Waterloo