OCTOBER WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about the books I read in October. I read 6 books this month. Here are my thoughts on all of them:

1. SELF-PUBLISHED EPIC FANTASY: Of Blood And Fire by Ryan Cahill

When I first started reading fantasy, I read epic fantasy. I love this genre, but I had to take a break from it after reading it nonstop for several years. Today, I’m trying to get back into it and I thought that Of Blood And Fire by Ryan Cahill, Book One of The Bound And The Broken series, might be a good one to do so. This book was originally published in 2021 and though it doesn’t provide anything new to the genre, it does give a fresh perspective to it. The protagonist, Calen, embarks on a hero’s journey and he personifies the trope of the Chosen One. Yet there are parts of the story that make it stand out, like the world it is set in and the magic the beings in this world can wield. Likewise, the author focuses more on character development than on world-building and explaining the magic system and this allows us as readers to connect with the main character, his friends, and the people who help him along the way on his journey. I really liked this. I also liked the dragons. Most of my favorite epic fantasy series have dragons in them, and I doubt that this one will be the exception.

This book is a solid first entry of a series and that it has potential to become one of my favorites. I am eager to see where it goes.

2. HISTORICAL FICTION AND MAGIC REALISM: You Dreamed Of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

This novel is a “darkly imaginative historical novel that reimagines the final days of the Mexica Empire through a surreal and politically charged lens. The author reconstructs the confrontation between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma not as a tale of conquest and military aggression but as one of mutual incomprehension.” The Spaniards, for example, misinterpret Mexica politics, symbolic and heavily based on ritual, as weak and absurd, while the Aztecs see the Spaniards irreverence as a dangerous form of madness. Moctezuma’s obsession with the horses, creatures hitherto unknown to the Mexica, embodies this estrangement. The Mexica Emperor “projects mythic and divine qualities onto them, misunderstanding their role in Spanish warfare while symbolically trying to absorb their power into the empire’s own mythos.” The Spanish invaders, on the other hand, view the Mexica world through “a Christian moral lens and they recoil in horror from practices like human sacrifice yet are unable to recognize their role as aggressors.” The worlds of the Mexica and the Spanish, in other words, are so different from one another that the weight of the misunderstandings between them is too heavy and unbridgeable. Thus, such misunderstandings eventually led the Mexica and Spaniards to a military escalation.

Structured around the emperor’s nap—before, during, and after his nap— the narrative presents a Mexica Empire “overburdened by tradition, superstition, and ceremonial inertia that it has become incapable of meaningful action. While everyone else strategizes around him, the emperor indulges in ritualized food and hallucinogens that leave him in a prolonged stupor, which functions as a haunting metaphor for imperial paralysis and a sovereignty that has lost its grip on reality. The tragedy lies not in failed politics, but in the surrender of human agency to visions that promise clarity but instead deliver annihilation (Books That Slay, June 20, 2025).”

I really wanted to like this book, but, unfortunately, I did not. Simply put, I didn’t like the author’s narrative and writing style and that my affected my overall appreciation and love for this novel.

3. CLASSICS AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

This is a classic children’s book that I had been wanting to read to my daughters for a while. Its premise is how toys and people become real through the wisdom and experience of love. My daughters don’t have a velveteen rabbit, but they do have a giraffe—Gerald, named after the dancing giraffe in Giraffes Don’t Dance by Giles Andreae—that they love, and, to them, that tiny giraffe, because he is pocket sized, is as real a giraffe as any of the giraffes they saw at the zoo during their school fieldtrip. I like to think that my daughters have taught him the value of friendship—they are best friends now—and he has taught them the importance of taking care of wild animals and the world. Though make-believe, it is a beautiful relationship and it all sprouted from this book. So, yes, I recommend it.

4. PSYCHOLOGY AND BUSINESS: Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D

This was an unusual read for me.  I don’t typically read psychology books, but this one was very interesting. What are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person? And what techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about this compliance? Why is a request stated in a certain way rejected, but a request that asks for the same thing in a slightly different way successful? This, the author says, is because of the Principles of Influence: Consistency, Reciprocation, Social Proof, Liking, Authority, Scarcity, and Unity. Reciprocation, for example, is when you repay what another person has provided you. So, if someone gave you a present for your birthday, you feel obligated to give him a present in return. Personalized and customized gifts, for example, increase obligation. Scarcity is the rule of the few. If something you want to buy is not readily available, you tend to want it even more.  Social proof is when we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct while authority refers to blind obedience to someone who is in authority over us, like a boss. Each one of these principles is analyzed in terms of their function in society but also in how their enormous force can help someone who is selling something make requests of others to say yes and buy their product or donate for their cause.

There are various editions of this book, and I found that they differ amongst themselves quite a bit. I read one of the most current versions.

5. POLITICS AND WAR: War by Bob Woodard

This book is a behind-the-scenes account of three wars that have been prominent on the world stage in “one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history”: The war in Ukraine, the most significant land war in Europe since WWII; the bloody Middle East conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas; and, finally, the fight for the office of President in the elections of 2024 between Biden and Trump and later Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee for president after Biden drops off the race.  

Reading this book helped me understand current affairs and the news a little better. It is a topic that I only just started reading about, but I think that this book, though good, is still biased and affected by the author’s dislike of Trump. This makes the book more subjective and less neutral in the events the author is relating.

This book came out a year ago, right before the elections, and it is Woodard’s account of the Biden presidency. He has a book for every president since Nixon, I think, and his bibliography includes a trilogy—Fear, Peril, and Rage—of President Trump’s first term. This is the first Bob Woodard book I pick up, and maybe I will pick another later but the author’s lack of objectivity was my main issue with this one.

6. CLASSICS AND GOTHIC MYSTERY: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I first read this book in 2020, during the pandemic, and, back then, I didn’t understand what Daphne du Maurier had done with this novel for the Gothic genre as a whole. Now, with a little help, I understand it better. Heavily inspired by events in her own life, du Maurier said that Rebecca was a “study in jealousy inspired by her own feelings toward her husband’s first fiancée.” The story, she said, was rooted in her experience of living with the influence of a previous wife and that the anonymous narrator’s reserved personality reflected parts of her own nature.

But I’ll be honest, the unnamed narrator is not a likeable character and neither is her husband, Maxim de Winter.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is insecure, naïve, self-conscious, shy and lacking in self-esteem. Her entire identity is subsumed by the overwhelming presence of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife, who died a year before, at Manderley. She is an unreliable narrator that struggles with jealousy as she imagines what Maxim’s life with Rebecca had been before she died, and this struggle emphasizes the fact that she can’t forge an identity of her own. In her fantasies, she isn’t the shy, meek, and insecure young woman she is now but the personification of who she thinks Rebecca was, and how her relationship with Maxim must’ve been.  

Once the truth about Rebecca is uncovered, the narrator is no longer defined by her insecurity and she becomes Mrs. De Winter in body and soul; still, this identity isn’t her own. She and Maxim are now one, and if he is tried for murder, so is she; his actions are her actions, and his culpability (spoiler alert) for killing Rebecca her culpability.  In the time when this book was written, husband and wife were legally considered a single entity. One couldn’t testify against the other because it was thought to be testifying against yourself but Maxim de Winter isn’t exactly the best of people either. He is the kind of person who prefers to kill his wife than to live through the scandal of a divorce. And the fact that the narrator loves him so foolishly and blindly doesn’t say great things about her either. This is also the reason, apparently, why Mr. Rochester couldn’t get rid of his wife in Jane Eyre either. Divorce laws in English at the time, though still favoring the husband over the wife, were still complicated for men who found themselves in a bad marriage. There are a lot of similarities between Jane Eyre and Rebecca. But there are also similarities between Rebecca and, funny enough, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. De Winter’s name, for example, is borrowed from Milady. And I say it’s funny because I did not like The Three Musketeers but I really liked Rebecca. However, apparently du Maurier was an avid fan of Dumas’s book.

This is not a ghost story, but Rebecca’s ghost is everywhere. And this is where du Maurier writing excels. Rebecca is dead, but she is not at rest. Her memory haunts both Maxim and his new bride from beginning to end. And once her body is discovered, the mystery is not about finding her killer but in figuring out why Maxim killed her. Moreover, why doesn’t he show any remorse and why is he exonerated for committing such a crime. Why is it better for everyone that Rebecca be dead? Because everyone knew that Maxim killed her, and yet, he is not punished for his deed.

Because she is a threat to Manderley and to the social order of things.

The ending of this novel, in my opinion, is superb and what elevates the novel to the next level. I also found that it is the perfect ending to the iconic first line of the book: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” and it makes you want to go back to the beginning and start reading the novel again. The difference is that this time you’ll know why the narrator and her husband are drifting from hotel to hotel in exile.

I recommend this book, yes.