Dave’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2025

Year in Books

76,171

pages read

448

books read

Dave Schaafsma

1 like Like

The Swan as Metaphor for Love by Amelia Gray

Shortest Book

pages

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Longest Book

1,041

pages

Average book length in 2025

170

pages

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

Most Shelved

6,480,947

people also shelved

Steinberg, Piper- Bucherei by Saul Steinberg

Least Shelved

people also shelved

Dave’s average rating for 2025

3.9

How to Love a Black Hole by Rebecca Fishow

Highest Rated on Goodreads

it was amazing

5.00 average

Dave’s first review of the year

it was amazing

First review of the year: Saga #71, Fiona Staples and Brian Vaughn, that features yet another spectacular cover by Staples, the early centerpiece of which is a new series fave Emesis, current bf (not bff; nothing’s forever for refugees such as they are) of our narrator Hazel. Anyway, awesome character design, much?! The first page of this issue shows Alana's carnie coworker reading a novel by her favorite novelist, D. Oswald Heist, Gentle Comedow ...more

DAVE’S 2025 BOOKS

it was amazing

Pocket Full of Rain and Other Stories by Jason

it was amazing

it was amazing

it was amazing

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

The Hunter and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson

The Displaced Person by Flannery O'Connor

it was amazing

really liked it

How Fear Departed the Long Gallery by E.F. Benson

Maigret on the Riviera by Georges Simenon

A Star Shines Through by Anna Desnitskaya

Hiro, Winter, and Marshmallows by Marine Schneider

Kevin and the Blackbirds by David Almond

it was amazing

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

it was amazing

Maigret and the Man on the Bench by Georges Simenon

Flannery O'Connor and the Scandal of Faith by Jessica Hooten Wilson

it was amazing

Oba Electroplating Factory by Yoshiharu Tsuge

it was amazing

Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays by Amanda Quaid

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

ZZ’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers by Karen Russell

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

it was amazing

Whose Footprints Are These? by Gerda Muller

Dave’s last review of the year

liked it

The Pleasing Hour (2000) is the first novel by Lily King. I just finished Heart the Lover (2025), which is much better, the book many people are now reading, so I thought I'd go back to this, as in part it is because I am a completist and I like her work. (though often contend with it)

The Pleasing Hour is by far the lowest rated of her books at 3.54 as of today. It involves Rosie, and it suddenly occurs to me that I can't do this without at least The Pleasing Hour (2000) is the first novel by Lily King. I just finished Heart the Lover (2025), which is much better, the book many people are now reading, so I thought I'd go back to this, as in part it is because I am a completist and I like her work. (though often contend with it)

The Pleasing Hour is by far the lowest rated of her books at 3.54 as of today. It involves Rosie, and it suddenly occurs to me that I can't do this without at least a couple spoilers: Rosie is a late teen whose sister can't have a baby, so she decides to make one for her! This is intriguing (and I have a personal story that relates to it: My sister and her wife had a baby carried to term for them by the wife's sister!). So the youthful goal and process seems a bit crazy, maybe improbable, as she just announces her pregnancy one day, but I liked it, though Rosie, having given birth, gets adoption regret and goes off to become an au pair in Paris to recover emotionally and physically for a year.

Right, to Paris to care for children such as she chose not to raise herself! And to have a predictable affair with the three decades older Marc, the man-of-the-house, who we learn is in a "loveless marriage," no surprise. So, eh, maybe we have had enough of nanny affairs with Daddy (cf., Schwarzenegger, Jude Law, Ben Affleck, Ethan Hawke and so on) to view it with any real complexity, as King attempts to do, though Rosie does try to connect to Nicole, the wife, to make amends.

On thing I will say for King is that writes very boldly and well in all her books about female desire, and while some may criticize these women for the sexual acts/relationships they are in, they all seems like very human, relatable characters, and King never condemns these women for anything they do. She really likes these women a lot and helps us like them, too. And the sex scenes are really good and convincing. I am tempted to say that the six books I have read are a kind of catalogue or series of portraits of female desire, among other things, from youth through middle age.

This book reminded me of an early book about a teenaged girl's sexual desire for a much older man by Elizabeth Strout, Amy & Isabelle, published a year earlier, and also convincing as a portrait of desire, though in Strout's book the guy is even more a predator. Both focus mostly on what these women feel and think. I really do like both of these books, as a whole, though Strout's and King's later books are better, and Heart the Lover (another youthful--undergrad!--book of sexual self-discovery, is much better, imho. ...more

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