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Currently reading:

Digital Fortress, Dan Brown
Henry and Cato, Iris Murdoch
Z, a Love Story, Vigdís Grímsdottir

Recent reads:

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, Frank McCourt. [4/5]
Captivating and humorous, though at times heart-breaking, account of McCourt's childhood in Limerick. Vividly warm and forgiving character development.

Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks. [2,5/5]
Good enough for a debut, but nothing compared to Banks's later work. The "hamletesque" ending felt sloppy, the characters rather bland. Odd anti-climax concerning the object of the story. Still, worth a read, keeps up the pace.

Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes [3,5/5]
A sweet, dreamy book with a lot of reference to food. A comfort read, especially when the weather outside is anything but summery.

The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad [2/5]
Offers a nice peek into the lives of an Afghanistani family, though the rendering was depressive, more so than the subjects and situations depicted in the book. Seierstad's enthusiasm to write the book as a mixture of fiction and non-fiction (she lived with the family while writing about them) and riddling the text with voluptuous and often melodramatic thoughts and feelings had me suspecting that she made up large parts of it. She frequently fell into the trap of "not like us = miserable", a perspective thoroughly annoying in this genre.