AUGUST WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’m reviewing the books I read in August. I read 6 books this month. Here are my thoughts on them:

1. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor, in the foreword to Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya Hartman, writes: “In the United States, we like to discuss the distortions of the nation’s history as amnesia, when it is more appropriate to understand our affliction as selective memory clotted with omissions intended to obscure the raw truth about our society.” This is true, I find, both about slavery and the empire of the United States hidden behind what Immerwahr calls “the logo map.” Most people envision the United States “as a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii”. The problem with this map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape doesn’t match the country’s legal borders. When have you ever seen a map of the United States that included Puerto Rico? Or American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the other islands the United States has annexed over the years? (Immerwahr, Introduction). The logo map is a depiction of the largest and most privileged part of the United States, the mainland, while all other colonies, later renamed territories, overseas―with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii, who achieved statehood in 1959―aren’t even mentioned.

This book is not a history of the United States, as A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen, or A Little History of the United States by James West Davidson, and yet it is the best book about the history of the United States that I have read thus far. It is also the best account of the Pacific War, fought between the US and Japan during WWII, that I have hitherto read. The Pacific War began December 7^th, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and ended September 2^nd, 1945. Pick this book up; I highly recommend it.

2. NONFICTION AND TRUE CRIME: What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher

This book was a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, it was not what I expected. I also don’t see how the title fits the account of the author’s life as a death investigator in New York City. I get that “dealing with death every day taught her surprising lessons about life” but I was expecting her to go more into detail about the cases she learned those lessons from. I felt that she mentioned them, said what she had learned from them, and then moved on to the next lesson. She never went back to a case to give the reader closure about it. And this happened from the very beginning. I understand though that there is only so much you can say about (then-active) murder investigations, yet I felt like I was left hanging every time. In later chapters, the author focuses more on the mental toll that dealing with so much death was putting on her and how that affected her personal life. I was not very interested in these chapters and I mean no disrespect to the author’s mental health issues when I say this, but it did make me realize that I picked this book up because I was interested in the science behind the crime and what she, as a forensic investigator, had done to help solve that crime. Only, I picked up the wrong book for that. I also picked this up at the wrong time. It was not what I was looking for. This book is a memoir; if you pick it up expecting what I was expecting, it is not going to deliver.

3. NONFICTION AND NATURE: Nature Underfoot: Celebrating Crabgrass, Silverfish, Fruit Flies, and Dandelions by John Hainze

Living with insects around us, both inside and outside our homes, is just an inevitable fact of life. No matter how many times we call the “pest guy” to come spray our home to kill the roaches, spiders, flies, and centipedes that make their way inside our house, there is always that one cockroach, spider, house fly (or fruit fly), or silverfish that is still alive. I’ve seen countless silverfish in my daughters’ toy bins or snuggled comfortably inside the pages of my favorite books and every time I kill them. It is what we do. The thought of living with these small creatures, which society has taught us are revolting, is downright disgusting to many of us. And the insecticide business has soared because of it. The global insecticide market size, for example, was valued at 13.31 billion USD in 2025 and is expected to grow to 14.06 billion in 2026.

The author, a former employee of one of these insecticide companies, however, learned to love the insects that he was helping these companies kill and decided to study them instead. Who knew, for example, that the courtship and mating ritual of silverfish could be so riveting? That sparks could fly with a mere graze of the male silverfish’s antennae upon the female’s? Or that flies, like the hoverflies or blowflies, are the second most important group of pollinators in the world, right after bees? I did not know that, but there was a lot about life that is happening right at our feet that I didn’t know and learned about while reading this book. It was a very interesting read. It also cemented my love for dandelions and I will always be happy when I see one of them growing in my yard. I am glad I picked this book up at my library store of used books.

4. CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE: Never Meant to Stay by Trisha Das

Romance, right. I have a very complicated relationship with romance. There are few books in this genre that I love; most, I never finish. However, I do want to start reading more of them again. A few weeks ago, I realized that I stepped away from this genre when I finished reading The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood in 2022. Now, I am slowly starting to give the romance genre another chance. A contemporary romance novel that I read last year is It’s Getting Hot in Here by Jane Costello but I didn’t like it. It’s always been hit or miss for me with contemporary romance so when I picked up Never Meant to Stay by Trisha Das I admit that I was not sure I was going to like it or be able to finish it. The whole setup felt rather forced. But I did like how the author portrayed Indian culture head on. Culture in this book isn’t just explained; it is something you are immersed in. Fully. The other thing I liked was the Khanna family. Beyond the romance, the most important thing in this book is family and I really liked how Samara was accepted into the Khanna family without prejudice and scorn. She was simply loved and accepted, no questions asked (with the exception of Sharav’s fiancée, for obvious reasons). However, I did feel that the romantic trope of the “Wanderer/Vagabond” in this book wasn’t used to its full potential. This trope can be one of the least romantic ones out there because we aren’t privy to much of the emotional angst/sexual tension between the protagonists (and how that makes them feel). Instead, a lot of the story is focused on the family; yes, family is very important in Indian weddings and part of the love story is Samara loving Sharav’s family as well. I knew Samara and Sharav were (falling) in love. It was palpable on the page. But I didn’t feel it. It was very satisfying though to see Sharav finally get rid of his annoying fiancée, who was very well written BTW, and seeing Samara and Sharav as a happily married couple at the end of the book was very cute and endearing but I still think there was something missing to help us go all the way with this couple. All in all, this story is PG-13 and cute but I doubt I’ll ever read it again.

5. HISTORICAL FICTION ROMANCE: The French War Bride by Robin Wells

Set in Nazi occupied France, the love story between a young French woman raising her best friend’s daughter and the honorable American army medic who marries her is a book I expected to love but, alas, didn’t. My biggest complaint is how the author wrote the plot. “At her retirement home in Wedding Tree, Louisiana, ninety-one-year-old Amélie O’Connor is in the habit of leaving her door open for friends. One day she receives an unexpected visitor—Kat Morgan, the ex-fiancée of her late husband, Jack.”

“I never knew what he saw in you,” Kat tells Amélie when she finally confronts the French war bride that married her fiancé. And then Amélie starts telling Kat, under her own conditions, the story of how she fell in love with Jack during the Nazi occupation of France. Only, it isn’t the story of how she fell in love with Jack during the Nazi occupation of France. It is the story of before Amélie met Jack and after.

I wanted to like this, and I genuinely thought I would. But, for starters, Amélie’s backstory takes up too many pages of the book. We are way past the halfway point of the physical book before she even meets Jack. This, however, is something I could get over. But how they get married is something I couldn’t. It was manipulative and deceitful. I know Amélie was desperate and war makes you do things you wouldn’t do in other circumstances, but it was still manipulative; it is hard for me to believe that love will grow after manipulating someone like Amélie manipulated Jack. Moreover, what few moments we’re shown later between the two of them to show us that their relationship is transforming from one of convenience to love are too few, too quick, and a bit forced to make the story believable.

The book is too unbalanced between the before and after; before Amélie’s meets Jack and after she meets him. After meeting him, she thinks of a plan to make him believe that she was the fiancée of the man who died in his arms, something we learn about at the beginning of the book, and he agrees to marry her out of guilt. Frankly, I didn’t appreciate this and it was my biggest problem with the book. He is also already dead by the time Jack’s spurned American ex-fiancée confronts Amélie and Jack can’t tell his own side of the story. The author portrays him as an honorable man but the fact that he married Amélie while he was engaged to Kat, however awful she is, gainsays all that decency and I had an issue with that. Yes, Jake knew he did something wrong and was conflicted about it. That is why he couldn’t look Amélie in the eye at the beginning of their relationship but Jake is conveniently dead now and he can’t tell us how Amélie’s manipulation affected him or how and when he started to love her.

Once there was love between the two of them, it was sweet. The grand gesture and climax of the story are cute (although a tidbit unbelievable). But my problem is that we are told (not shown) how that love grows. I don’t think I’ll ever read this book again.

6. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen

This book is a chronological account of the history of the United States since its founding in 1776 to 2021. And though it is more palatable than A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, I also found that A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen has the same problem as A Little History of the United States by James West Davidson: It gives the reader too much information in a condensed number of pages. A Little History is less than 400 pages while A True History is longer at approximately 700 pages, yet it still felt like it wasn’t enough space. The chapters on George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, which includes the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11^th, 2001, and Barack Obama, for example, felt too rushed, as if the author was running out of space or reaching his maximum number of pages to write this history in and couldn’t finish talking about them fast enough. I did, however, find the writing style of A True History more accessible than that of Howard Zinn, which I did not finish. A True History recounts what is traditionally taught in school, yes, but it also tries to tell some uncomfortable truths about several periods of the history of the US (hence, the word true in the title), like the violence and rampant killing of Native Americans during the colonies’ expansion to the West or slavery. I appreciated this. It tries to correct the traditional way of telling the history of the United States, with a selective memory and mental gaps that hide the awkward and hard truths of how the United States became what it is today. It tries to break from the mold and not paint the US as the hero of its own story because in many parts, it wasn’t. This was something that I liked about this book. The ending, however, was a bit lackluster.

This is everything I read in the month of August. My next post will be which one of these books was my best and worst read of the month.