JUNE 2026: Best and Worst Books of the Month

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be ranking the books I read in June. This month I DNF’d 1 book. Here’s my list:

9. Aeneid by Virgil (DNF)

Yeah, I really tried with this one. And I made it to the 45-50% mark, but I just couldn’t read the rest. I was bored out of my mind. And it’s not that I don’t like this book. I’ve read it before (in college). It’s just that I wasn’t in the right moment in my life to read it again.

8. Myths of Geography: Eight Ways We Get the World Wrong—A Compelling Nonfiction Exploration of Geopolitical Borders by Paul Richardson

This book was a little bit of a let-down. It started out great, but then it went downhill a little bit after the halfway point. It went from addressing questions about the continents and borders between countries to specific issues such as GDP, Russia’s search for warm-water port and China building a New Silk Road in the digital era of today. Half of it was for the general reader, half of it was not.

7. The Perfect Sword: Forging the Dark Ages by Paul Gething and Edoardo Albert

I wanted to like this book more, but unfortunately, I did not. The Bamburgh Sword was first discovered by Brian Hope-Taylor in 1970 at Bamburgh Castle. Thirty years later, Paul Gething re-discovered it in a suitcase. When it was first found, the sword was broken. It had no hilt, just the extension of the blade that fits into the hilt (the tang) and the top half of the sword. It was also heavily rusted and corroded, yet for its time, the 7^th century, this was the perfect sword.

The knowledge required to forge such a sword is lost to us today, and, in this book, the authors attempt to explain how such a sword would’ve been forged. Unfortunately, this shifted the focus of the book from the how to the what. I felt like I was reading a book about blacksmithing during the Middle Ages than about the Bamburgh Sword honestly.

6. Porfirio Díaz, His Life and Times: The War 1830-1867 by Carlos Tello Díaz

This book is the first volume of a comprehensive and detailed biography―written in three parts―of Porfirio Díaz, the president of Mexico from 1877 to 1911. For 30 years, Porfirio Díaz kept a centralized state under his firm control, but the population revolted against him in 1910 after he announced he was going to run for president yet again. These events led to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. The book is well-written and historically documented. However, it does have a couple of things readers might not like: 1) there is a noticeable bias of the author towards Díaz, as the former is a blood relation of the latter, and 2) the author tends to describe events in extreme detail that sometimes it is more than what is necessary. Despite this, I will continue on with the second volume in the series later.

5. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

This small book is a “call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.” Written shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, the new edition has been updated to include what the author calls The Big Lie (Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen), the attack on the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021, and Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. Each one of these lessons is explained with a historical example from the 20^th century.  

4. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

This was a surprising read and it has become one of my favorite books in children’s literature. I highly recommend it.

3. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

This is one of my favorite books by this author. Based on a true story, this book is a critique of the social standards expected of women and men in Latin American culture. I highly recommend it.

2. Amphitryon (Shadow Without a Name) by Ignacio Padilla

This is a book about identity and imposture; about the power of deceit and how history can be changed when real individuals are replaced by imposters. It all begins with a game of chess…the winner takes your identity and you become someone else. Hence, the cover. This was a re-read for me; it is one of the books that I read for a paper in my Mexican Literature class during college years ago and, back then, it quickly became one of my favorite books from that course. Today, it still is.  I recommend it a lot. Ignacio Padilla is a Mexican author worth talking about.

1. Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity by Fergus Butler-Gallie

I am avid reader of history, not travelogues. This one is both, and I liked it a lot. A surprising read for me this month, I didn’t think it was going to be my favorite book of the month when I picked it up. But it was. And I was hesitant to buy it at the store because of the price. Yet, I kept coming back to it until I said, “I’m taking it.” And I’m glad I did. History of religion has always been something I like to read about; it is not a topic for everyone, I know that. But the history of some of the most iconic churches in the world was a book I couldn’t pass up on. I recommend it to any reader of the history of religion like myself.