FEBRUARY 2026: Best and Worst Books of the Month

Hi everyone. Today, I’ll be talking about the best and worst books I read in February.

1.WORST BOOK OF THE MONTH: Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto)by Mario Vargas Llosa

I picked this book up as my romance read for the month of February in one of my book clubs. It is not a HEA romance though. I didn’t like any of the characters, and though the main characters were deeply in love, they were also unlikeable. They are terrible people. Granted, Vargas Llosa’s use of ecphrasis is superb in this novel and as a whole it is a manifesto of sex through art and literature. Sex is beautiful, I agree. And when it is done by two people who are deeply in love, like these two, even more so. But Rigoberto, Lucrecia, and Fonchito are just awful people and I couldn’t root for any of them.

2. BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

This is the story of an unnamed Japanese-American family banished from their quiet life in Berkeley to spend over three years in an internment camp for a simple “crime” of being Japanese in the US during World War II.

When you get labeled as “the Other”, you suffer immeasurable pain and sorrow. And this has repeated itself in history innumerable times: West vs. East, European vs. Indigenous, Victor vs. Defeated, Christianity vs. Paganism, etc… This book is poignant because it not only tells the story of that one Japanese-American family, which could be any Japanese-American family in the US, but the detached narrative style that Otsuka uses also reminds us that Japanese-Americans have not been the only ones to be considered as “the Other” throughout history. There have been others, and just like them, we too can be seen as such in the future.

3. LITERARY FICTION AND COMING OF AGE: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (DNF)

I DNF’d this one at 60% because the more I read the more unbelievable it got. In addition, I was slowly starting to dislike the main character a great deal. I picked it up because I was curious how the paintings The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius and The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt were involved in the plot of the story, but the short answer is not very much. Fabritius’s painting spends most of the novel “stored away” and Rembrandt’s has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. This was disappointing. But I continued reading. Yet I was not a fan of where the story was going after Theo moves to Las Vegas; the author spends way too many pages detailing how he and Boris (one of Theo’s ‘great friends’ of his life) get high and wasted yet that doesn’t stop Boris from stealing the painting on one of the days when Theo was too stoned to even notice. This made me dislike Boris (I already didn’t like him very much) even more, although I had already deduced that this was going to happen. It was obvious. What is more, by page 560 Theo was still not involved in the criminal underworld he is supposed to have been lured into by the painting. I know that in Chapters 10-12, the last three chapters that I didn’t read, he goes to Amsterdam in search of the painting but I didn’t want to read/listen to a chapter that lasts 5 hours in the audiobook. This book is too long for what it is, and I didn’t want to give it another 5 hours of my time if I wasn’t enjoying it and not liking it very much. I don’t think I’ll pick up another book by this author.

4. Lily Narcissus by Jonathan Lerner (DNF)

I DNF’d this book pretty early on because I couldn’t get into it, which is unfortunate because I was interested in it but I just couldn’t.

This is everything for now. Thank you for stopping by. My next posts will be my book club reviews for the month of March.