My participation in this meme was directly inspired by my new bookish friends: Avalinah + Savanah via this post!

[Official Blurb] The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share News. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog. This is your news post, so personalize it! Include as much as you want or as little. Be creative, it can be a vlog or just a showcase of your goodies. Link up once a week or once a month, you decide. Book haul can include library books, yard sale finds, arcs and bought books..share them!

• Enter your link on the post- Sundays beginning at 12:01 am (CST) (link will be open all week)
• Link back to this post or this blog
• Visit others who have linked up

A note about the format I am using to journal #TheSundayPost: I am finding I like being able to give my readers who cannot visit my blog each time a new post, review or guest feature goes live a digest journal of what is happening on #JLASblog each week! If you are familiar with the style in which I journal my readerly adventures via #WWWednesdays (see also Archive) you’ll know why I like this journalled style for #TheSundayPost!

It’s a way of talking about what is bookishly on my mind whilst sharing where my travels in Fiction & Non-Fiction took me through the last seven days! Quite stellar – so very thankful I was encouraged to participate as I love being able to think about which stories settled into my heart and which of the stories I am most eager to see arrive by postal mail and/or via audiobook! It’s a bit of a lovely way to journal your bookish life and have a weekly reminder of the experiences of you’ve gathered and love to remember! In regards to getting back into the groove with #WWWeds – I’m either going to make the meme bi-monthly or monthly which I’ll decide within the next fortnight.

Hallo, dear hearts, welcome to an INSPY filled July,..

Finding my new pace & rhythm with my reading life has been the most difficult part of my Summer, as I had planned to *devour!* loads of #FantasyReads in May – heaps of #AudioReads in June – whilst July was meant to be stuffed to the gills with #INSPY stories spilt between Fiction & Non-Fiction! I was also planning to release reviews for the colouring books which I’ve happily enjoyed creating art inside whilst I’ve listened to audiobooks! Thankfully, as there is still a bit of time left to the month, I can run a series of reviews befitting my original goals for July (including those colouring books!).

The main reason I was thrown off-kilter this year was due to the health reasons I previously disclosed after #WyrdAndWonder, yet what I hadn’t realised then, as I do know is how many after effects I truly had to trudge through in order to resume where I left off reading! This July, when I stumbled across the Christian & Clean Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Singing Librarian Books – I had no idea how this would deeply impact my life! I blog about my passionate appreciation for INSPY Lit quite often even though it is not always as regularly as I would prefer – I’ve been striving for a better balance of stories being read/heard between both mainstream and INSPY markets – a goal I’ve had tucked onto the backburner for the 5 years I’ve been blogging on Jorie Loves A Story!

July was giving me this opportunity to find a renewal of purpose to focus on #INSPYreads as due to how the challenge was self-directed and self-motivating towards your own personal goals – this is what I did to get into the mindset of approaching it:

→ I developed a book list I wanted to use as a primer and guide towards what I could read

→ I kept very loose goals per day and week – meaning, if I was finding myself tucking into a story where I could only read a few chapters at a time, I considered this a ‘win!’

→ The beauty of the challenge was not needing to ‘blog’ per se to participate – this opened the door for me to head into the twitterverse to micro-blog my updates, interact with the authors I was reading and give myself a much needed hiatus from weekly blogging! (it also helped I was under-booked!)

→ A bit of a competition between your Mum goes a long way towards reclaiming your reading life as well! I have made it quite well know I’ve been following in Mum’s footsteps towards reading the Love INSPIRED Suspense series – as she has beloved favourites: Elizabeth Goddard, Laura Scott, Lenora Worth, etc of whom she’d like me to read and become introduced to in order to start having fireside chats about the characters, the plots and the wicked intensity of ‘feeling on edge’ throughout the course of the novels! (we’ve started in on that goal, too!)

→ Call me crazy but I used the widget for the bookaways as a personal ‘self-check’ towards staying on my goals, keeping the ‘pleasure’ in my reading hours without the added worry of (should I blog, shouldn’t I blog) chatter whilst finding with each new day I was ‘recording’ my progresses – either by audiobooks listened to (as of now, I heard two) or books read (as of now, three) and a sampling of what I was microblogging on Twitter – you could say it proved fruitful for a girl whose angst was not just limited to her personal health but as a step towards reconciling how to be a ‘reader’ when she didn’t feel like being a ‘book blogger’. This is something I haven’t resolved in five years – as I was a reader before I was a blogger but I was also a reader in a semi-permanent reader’s rut at the same time – part of the reason I was having guilt over ‘not blogging’ is I didn’t want to backslide into a period of time where I was ‘not reading’ and thereby, erasing the process of the past five years where I have re-established myself into the genres I love and finding my own rhythm for how I read/blog/tweet my reading life!

Another aspect of what was aiding my recovery post-migraines this July is the fact the Love Inspired novels were either Large Print, Larger Print or in the case of one of the Ms Worth novels “True Large Print” which for me felt GIGANTIC! lol I had started to notice this was something which was helpful to me as I was reading Harlequin Roms for some of the Prism Book Tours I was hosting throughout the past eight or so months? Those stories were generally in Large print themselves and being I had so many migraines to overcome, I noticed the font size being enlarged was a lovely step ‘back’ towards reading regular print!

Curious about which INSPY stories

caught my heart & left me musefully happy afterwards!?

Shielding His Christmas Witness | thrifted

The Only Witness | ILL’d (inter-library loan)

*bookmark, FREE at my local library – I am in FULL agreement of the sentiment!

For Laura Scott, you might want to check-out my micro-blog about reading her #CallahanConfidential first as I was on the VERY edge of my cosy comfort chair awaiting the ‘final’ chapter to see what would become of Kari & Marc! You forsake SLEEP reading these Love Inspired Suspense novels!! At least, I find you do! I couldn’t dare think I’d have to take a wink & a nod away from the action! You barely get to catch your breath whilst your reading the story-line as so much is happening ALL at once! Plus, I like how the heroes of the stories are charmingly honest, realistically relatable and have their own fair share of faults to round off the joy of reading their adventures! Seriously though – if you want a slightly lighter side to your Suspense Reads but with the full-octane of traditional Suspense, you ought to give Laura Scott a chance at charming your bookish heart!

READ my microblogging notes!

→ Shielding His Christmas Witness (Callahan Confidential, Book One) by Laura Scott Read More

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• #CFSRS18