July pleasure reading, part 2

I have finished another book this month, the first John Grisham book I’ve ever read (that I remember…) and it was called The Confession.

The story was really good and very intriguing – it only took me 2 days to read the whole thing and I’ll certainly look in to checking out other books by him.  The whole premise of the story was also thought-provoking because it was about a criminal who got away with a murder that a man on death row is about to be executed for committing.  The minister who this murderer confides in tries to convince him to turn himself in to save the innocent man.  The story is about racing the clock to the execution time as well as getting authorities to believe the criminal when he says he is the murderer.

This book was heavily tilted against the death penalty, given as how it was told from the perspective of a minister and just the fact that it was about trying to get an innocent man off of death row.  As someone in favor of the death penalty I am a bit confused by the attitude that a lot of more liberal people take, saying that the death penalty is “cruel and unusual”.  I’d say it’s infinitely crueler for someone to torture, rape, murder, imprison, etc another person than it is to be heavily sedated to the point that your heart stops and you just don’t wake up.  I like to think that the possibility of the death penalty causes people who are willing to commit such crimes to perhaps think twice about their actions. 

I also find people who are against the death penalty but favor abortion, especially late-term abortion, to be pretty hypocritical.  This is especially annoying to me in people who are liberal and religious and use religion as their basis for objection to the death penalty but feel that abortion is somehow not included in the blanket “thou shalt not kill” statement (and yes, I’m aware how people define “life” and argue that it does not apply to a fetus that could not live outside the womb).  For my own personal reasons I disagree with abortion but I also don’t agree with the government trying to dictate what a woman can do with her own body (also ironic that most people who are pro-choice only disagree with that particular infringement into personal rights made by large and over-reaching governments), so I’m not saying that I think abortion should be illegal just that people who are pro-abortion and anti-death penalty need to figure out what they actually think and how they can be okay with one and not the other.  Basically what motivates my feelings is the presence of guilt in one case and not the other; executing a criminal who committed heinous crimes against another individual is not the same as abortion.

I also just finished the book Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs.  I decided to check out this author because her books are the ones that the show Bones on Fox is loosely based on.

I enjoyed this book a lot too -- the story was good even if the characters are not really at all similar to the tv show.  I'm sure I'll end up reading more of her books because as you can see, she has many!  This was not nearly as controversial as The Confession, and was pretty much the standard murder mystery.