Literary allusion

He's my husband, so I can steal his ideas, right? Actually, I thought a review of books read over the past year would be a gratifying exercise, so here you go:

Fiction

• "The House of Spirits" -- Isabel Allende -- very good, but a bit hard to stay enthralled


• "Farenheit 451" -- Ray Bradbury -- hardly the first time through, but how can you not repeatedly devour this book?


• "The Mists of Avalon" -- Marion Zimmer Bradley -- interested for the first 300 pages or so, but then I got tired of it. Not a huge fantasy fan


• "Angels & Demons" -- Dan Brown -- a page-turner, but no where near as good as Da Vinci


• "The Red Tent" -- Anita Diamant -- this fabulous book reduced me to tears -- again


• "As Hot As It Was, You Ought To Thank Me" -- Nanci Kincaid -- a surprisingly good book that I fully intended to review and never did


• "Cloud Atlas" -- David Mitchell -- in progress, and a very interesting read, but I'm not good at tearing through non-narrative books


• "Gilead" -- Marilynne Robinson -- wonderful characterization, though I'm not sure it merited the Pulitzer

Non-fiction

• "Asi Es" -- my Spanish textbook that I don't feel like looking for the author of


• "The New Testament: A Student's Introduction" -- Stephen Harris -- it's so nice having a Harvard educated friend who offers essentially free religious studies classes


• "The Old Testament: An introduction to the Hebrew Bible" -- Stephen Harris