JULY 2026: Best and Worst Books I Read This Month

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be ranking the books I read in July. Sorry for the late post, but here it is. Unfortunately, I did not read a new favorite this month:

4. El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Coronel) by Gabriel García Márquez

I have read several books by this author this year, but this one is the one I have liked the least. The main themes of this book are hope, dignity, and the weariness of waiting for something that is never going to arrive. I appreciate why this short novel occupies the place it does today in Latin American literature, however, I don’t think I’ll ever read it again.

3. The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair

What happens when you write a book about the history of fashion? It will probably become one of my new favorites reads of the month. After all, it is about two of my favorite things: History and fashion. However, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair didn’t exactly get there. Yes, the book did make me think twice about what I wear and to start taking a closer look at the label of anything I might buy at the store. Also, it does a very good job at reminding you that you are very much a part of the history of fashion today that has yet to be written. And yet, there was something about this book that made me stop from loving it. I think it was the author’s writing style and the narrator’s style of reading it in the audiobook version…they didn’t mesh together. It is still a very good book but, ironically, I still think it could’ve been better.

2. A Little History of the United States by James West Davidson

This is also a book that I thought I would like more…it is a good (re)introduction to the history of the United States for the general reader. It addresses all of the milestones of the United States’ history. However, it tries to condense so much information and goes so fast that someone like me, who didn’t grow up in the States and didn’t learn any of that history in school, gets bombarded with all of it. Maybe I need to pick it up again later, and I probably will. This is not to say that the book is bad…it isn’t. It is just not the right book to pick up when you have no prior knowledge of the topic. If you do, I think this would be the perfect book to remember what you were taught all those years ago in middle and high school.

1. Peregrinos (Tears of Amber) by Sofía Segovia

This was the best book I read in July. It is the story of the Schippers and the Hahlbrocks, two displaced Polish families that find one another at the end of the war; it is about the journey that each one of these families went through to survive WWII and the story about how their youngest members, Arno Schipper and Ilse Hahlbrock met, fell in love, and emigrated to Mexico after the war. I enjoyed this book a lot, and highly recommend it. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that the author is from Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, a city that I lived in for more than 15 years and that is close to my heart. 

That is everything for now. Thank you for stopping by.