New Shelf Goodies & The Weekly Nutshell {191}

For New Shelf Goodies, I'll be showing you what lovely books I acquired this week, whether from publishers, or the library, or from whatever half-crazed book-buying binge I happened to go on. :D (Inspired by Tynga's Stacking the Shelves) The Weekly Nutshell will be just that...my week here at Stories & Sweeties, in a nutshell. (inspired by Ginger @ GReads and her recaps at the end of the TGIF posts)

So first off, guys, quick announcement!  It appears that after 7 years of my domain name auto-renewing with no issues, it's suddenly expired and sold out from under me. :( I'm trying to find out what happened and see if there is anyway to get it back, but until then, Stories & Sweeties will be here at it's original address of Storiesandsweeties.blogspot.com. 

Okay, onto the haul! This is two weeks worth of lovely things that have come my way!

From Trade:

Haunting the Deep by Adriana Mather

Thanks so much for trading with me, Amanda! :D

Macmillan Fall Releases:

Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore 

Kids Like Us by Hilary Reyl 

Ready to Fall by Marcella Pixley 

Devil in Ohio by Daria Polatin

My New Crush Gave to Me by Shani Petroff

Finished copies from HarperCollins:

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

Dividing Eden by Joelle Charbonneau

Spindle Fire by Lexa Hillyer

Looking for Group by Rory Harrison

Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sarah Prager

Liberty: The Spy Who (Kind of) Liked Me by Andrea Portes

From Little Brown:

Crazy House by James Patterson

SO I got quite a mixed bag of stuff these past weeks! A majority of this was unsolicited and I always tend to have mixed feelings about receiving unsolicited stuff. Sometimes its a great way to find stuff I might never have considered adding to my tbr, sometimes its a total miss for me. Super excited to have a finished copy of Eliza and Her Monsters, though, and Wild Beauty GAHHH so excited for that one. I was super excited to find a trade for Haunting the Deep (it may be morbid but I tend to love stories surrounding the Titanic). And some of these, like Kids Like Us, were not really on my radar before receiving them but I'm actually eager to check them out now that they've landed in my lap! :D

The Weekly Nutshell
So I know I've been a bad blogger lately. I've been insanely busy with work and end of school stuff for my little (not so little wahhhh) guy, and etsy stuff.  This most recent blow of losing my site name has gotten me thinking that maybe its a sign? For a long time I've been asking myself if the blog is the right direction to keep going in---I love it, I do, but I've been eeking out less and less time for it.  Plus the way things are now, the way the community is changing, seems to divide things up so extensively---things have to be split or shared to every media, blog, twitter, Instagram, etc.  Sometimes it makes more sense to me to pick one or two that seem to be best for getting the word out about what books I'm excited about, and  sometimes I think that maybe a blog isn't the most efficient way to do it anymore. And then, on the other hand---I love blogging and putting out the new release list, and writing my  rambly reviews LOL, and matching recipes to books, and find hidden gems to feature for my WoW posts haha---I would really miss that. After 7 years of blogging (7 years, guys!!:D), it would be a hard thing to let go of. So I go back and forth and round and round. I'd be curious to hear what you guys think. Have you fellow bloggers ever felt this way? Are blog readers still eager to visit a blog daily and read them? Where do you mostly get your book news from? What makes you most excited about a book: an instagram post? A giveaway? A review? I'd love to know! 

Anyhooo :D Happy reading, everyone!