Everything I Read in July, Ranked (And What It Taught Me About My Reading Taste)

Photo by Denitsa Kireva via Pexels (licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Every month, I tell myself I won't become overly ambitious with my reading plans. And every month… I fail.

July was supposed to be the month I tackled a mountain of books that had been sitting on my TBR cart for months. Romance, fantasy, mystery, literary fiction, political science… I somehow convinced myself I could comfortably fit all of them into one month.

Spoiler alert: I didn't!

But I also read more than I expected, discovered a new favourite romance author (one that definitely won’t surprise you at all), found what may genuinely be one of my least favourite books ever ever, and realised something surprising about my own reading taste.

So here's everything I read in July, ranked from favourite to least favourite, not necessarily by literary quality, but by how much I actually enjoyed the experience of reading them. 

1. Funny Story by Emily Henry ★★★★★

And now, I finally understand the Emily Henry hype.

I'd somehow managed to go years without reading her books, despite seeing them everywhere. Funny Story completely changed that.

It's warm without becoming overly sentimental, genuinely funny without trying too hard, and full of the kind of emotional honesty that makes contemporary romance work. More importantly, it's joyful. That became surprisingly important for me this month.

Many of the books I picked up in July revolved around grief, distance, or losing the people we love. As someone who lives far away from most of the people I care about, I realised halfway through the month that I simply wasn't in the emotional headspace for so many stories exploring those themes.

Funny Story was the exception that my heart very much needed this month, a breath of fresh air with a comforting happy ending. It was light, color, humour, and overall so enjoyable that I truly couldn’t put it down.

It reminded me that romance doesn't have to be cheesy to feel good and doesn’t have to end in, or come from, heartbreak to be meaningful.

2. Happy Place by Emily Henry ★★★★☆

Immediately after finishing one Emily Henry novel, I picked up another. That probably tells you everything you need to know.

Although I preferred Funny Story, Happy Place confirmed that Emily Henry had become one of my favourite contemporary romance writers.

Ironically, I loved these books so much that I deliberately decided not to read the third Emily Henry novel sitting on my shelf. Sometimes it's nice to know you still have a guaranteed comfort read waiting for you.

Happy Place is a dreamish summer escape, it’s the perfect summer read, it's the book you need to take with you for your last trip before the summer ends. It is all the beautiful parts of growing up, all the joy of friendships you find in your 20s, and all the comfort of knowing that growth brings change, but that change is normal and good. 

Happy Place is not just a love story, it's also the most comforting ‘no, you’re not the only one that’s busy’ and ‘yes, it is okay that your friendships don’t look like they do in movies every day because life gets in the way’ that every 20 to 25 year old starting to see the change in their personal relationships needs to hear. 

My only complaint here is that it felt like the true giddiness and joy of a good love story only truly showed up in the last five chapters. 

The first half of the book is, while confusing, interesting and seems to be leading to a joyful end. The next 45% is mostly very pessimistic and makes you think it's not going to be a nice story at all. 

And it's only at the very end that the reader gets some direction, explanation, and understanding of what the characters actually want.

3. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid ★★★★☆

This might be my most controversial opinion of the month, because I think Atmosphere is a genuinely excellent novel. But, I also don't think I read it at the right time.

Without giving away spoilers, the novel deals heavily with love, loss and the fragility of human relationships - topics that had already appeared repeatedly throughout almost everything else I was reading and watching in July.

So by the time I reached Atmosphere, I was emotionally exhausted.

And then in the first chapter of the book (hence why this is not a spoiler), most of the main characters die. 

The writing is beautiful, the characters are wonderfully developed and the emotional payoff is absolutely earned.

But I couldn't fully enjoy it because I felt as though every piece of media I encountered that month wanted to make me cry and what I thought would be a light-hearted love story only brought some gratification in the second half of the literal last page of the book.

I will say, this was my first Taylor Jenkins Reid read and she is as wonderful as everyone claims. Not only was her writing an artistic masterpiece of beauty and passion, but I was also happily surprised by the evident amount of research and dedication to the background she clearly puts into her novels.

Sometimes, unfortunately, books are just victims of timing rather than quality.

4. Powerless by Lauren Roberts ★★★☆☆

This is probably the hardest book on the list to rank.

If I were judging solely the final hundred pages, it would rank much higher.

Those last chapters are exciting, emotionally engaging, and exactly the sort of fantasy storytelling I enjoy.

Unfortunately, I can't completely separate the reading experience from discourse surrounding the novel, whether that’s the accusations of plagiarism, AI usage and wider controversy, which inevitably influenced the way I approached it.

I'll reserve final judgement until I've read the rest of the series (and Red Queen, to be able to properly compare), but for now it sits somewhere firmly in the middle and I promise to get back to you with a full review.

5. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz ★★★☆☆

This was one of my biggest surprises.

I'd been putting it off for ages and expected a fairly typical coming-of-age romance.

Instead, I found something much… quieter?

The pacing is gentle, the writing beautifully understated, and the relationship between Aristotle and Dante feels incredibly sincere - but also, unreal.

My biggest issue was actually the dialogue. Throughout the novel, I kept forgetting the protagonists were teenagers

because they rarely sounded like any teenagers I'd ever met. It often felt as though toddler brains had been imagined inside adolescent bodies.

During every conversation and interaction for the first half of the book, it felt like they were 10 instead of 15. And that’s just an easy way to address the ‘off’ feeling I got. 

Overall, it felt like the author had never been a teenager himself, like he had forgotten what having a conversation at fifteen was like or what a fifteen-year-old does in their free time. 

Even if it is set in the 1980s, I don’t feel like that fully explains that disconnect.

Even so, it remained an enjoyable read, and I can see why this novel was well loved some years ago. 

Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t enough to convince me to read the next book in the duology, and that about sums up my feelings in relation to it.

6. Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi ★★★★☆

I still think this is one of the most original mysteries I've read in years.

A detective novel about the mathematics of detective novels? Now that’s an irresistible premise.

I loved the structure, the embedded short stories, and the way Pavesi deconstructs the murder mystery genre itself.

I just wish the ending had delivered on everything the novel promised. After so much careful build-up, the resolution felt surprisingly rushed and not even very gratifying.

It's clever- it just wasn't entirely satisfying.

7. History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera ★★☆☆☆

This one disappointed me.

I absolutely loved They Both Die at the End, so I came into this expecting another emotionally devastating but ultimately rewarding story.

Instead, I struggled.

Again, this was probably affected by the month I was having.

So many of my July reads revolved around grief, loss and complicated relationships that when I reached Adam Silvera's novel, I simply couldn't emotionally engage with it.

Regardless of my feelings while reading this novel, I do still think it doesn’t fully deal with the seriousness behind the events of the book.

In its short ~200 pages it opens up a lot of doors, deals with very heavy and emotionally impactful topics… and yet, doesn’t truly address or unpack what the actions of the characters and the selfishness behind those actions means, but rather just goes through them like motions. 

I suspect this time, it says as much about my reading mood as it does about the book itself.

8. Mile High by Liz Tomforde ★☆☆☆☆

And finally, this was not only my least favourite book of July, but may genuinely be one of the worst books I've ever read.

I know that's a bold statement, especially considering how beloved it is on BookTok. I wanted to like it, I really did.

Instead, I found myself increasingly frustrated by the writing, the character dynamics, and what felt like an overreliance on explicit scenes at the expense of meaningful storytelling.

I’m not exaggerating. About every two chapters, you get ten pages of smut. From. The. Very. Beginning. 

There were also aspects of the representation, particularly surrounding race and mental health, that simply didn't work for me.

The overall normalization, and borderline justification, of micro-racism, sexism, abuse of power in work settings, and more, was off-putting to say the least.

Furthermore, the fact that such a book can easily become a reader favorite - even if it is on BookTok - should make us question what kind of society we’re building and what our generation truly stands for. Loud voices speaking on trending social justice topics don’t mean a lot when the rest of the time we’re uplifting cultural influencers like this book. 

I've already published a full review explaining why, but this was the rare BookTok recommendation (for me) that completely missed the mark.

The books that didn't quite make the ranking

Not every book I picked up actually made it to the finish line.

I started The White King before realising - far later than I should have - that it was actually the third book in a trilogy.

Needless to say, that one's going back on the shelf until I can start from the beginning.

Finally, I read Japan, Internationalism and the United Nations, which I deliberately haven't included in the ranking. Not because it wasn't excellent, because it absolutely was, but because it serves a completely different purpose. Comparing a scholarly work on Japanese foreign policy to an Emily Henry romance just doesn't really make much sense or justice to the books, does it? They're trying to achieve entirely different things. 

What July taught me about my reading taste:

Looking back, I realised something I hadn't noticed while I was reading. Almost every book I struggled with had one thing in common: they centred around separation, grief, or losing the people we love.

Usually, I enjoy emotionally challenging books. This month, I didn't.

Living abroad inevitably means spending long periods away from the people who matter most, and I think I reached a point where I simply needed stories that offered comfort instead of heartbreak.

For some of us, reading is not just a stream of education and culture, but it also means the possibility to live a million different lives. 

That's probably why Emily Henry ended up dominating my rankings. Sometimes the best book isn't necessarily the most ambitious one, it's simply the one you need.

If you’re also a reader that struggles with this, or if you’re seeing everyone online reading books that seem more profound than the ones you’re picking up, remember that reading is not a sport - it’s the opportunity to escape reality for a brief window of time. What’s someone else’s cup of tea doesn’t have to be yours.

So July reminded me too that reading is never entirely objective. The books we love are shaped not only by what's written on the page, but by who we are when we read them. And honestly, I think that's part of what makes reading so fascinating.

Until the next page!

---

Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor