And Then These Are Some Books I Want to Read

Oh I think it's fun to have a booklust post once or five times a week, don't you?

Here are a few books I'd really like to read:

About the Book: As a lawyer, David R. Dow has represented over 100 death row cases. Many of his clients have died. Most were guilty. Some might have been innocent. The Autobiography of an Execution is his deeply personal story about justice, death penalty, and a lawyer’s life.

It is a chronicle of a life lived at paradoxical extremes: Witnessing executions and then coming home to the loving embrace of his wife and young son, who inquire about his day. Waging moral battles on behalf of people who have committed abhorrent crimes. Fighting for life in America’s death penalty capital, within a criminal justice system full of indifferent and ineffectual judges. Racing against time on behalf of clients who have no more time. (Twelve Publishers)

The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow --surprise! I hate capital punishment. And I think that books like this are good and necessary reminders of why.

About the Book: When Angel sets fire to her childhood home, it isn't the end--it's the beginning. Left with nothing but a few memories in her pocket, Angel escapes into the fields of tobacco, the only place she has ever felt safe. Hidden by those green-gold leaves, she sets her eyes on the mountains and believes someone waits for her there. Angel will do whatever she has to until she finds her. She longs to empty her pockets, hand over the answers to what became of her, and whisper, This is my story. (Center Street)

The Memory Thief by Rachel Keener
Okay so I love the cover. And it looks good!!!

Occupied City by David Peace

About the Book: A fierce, exquisitely dark novel that plunges us into post–World War II Occupied Japan in a Rashomon-like retelling of a mass poisoning (based on an actual event), its aftermath, and the hidden wartime atrocities that led to the crime.

On January 26, 1948, a man identifying himself as a public health official arrives at a bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he explains, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat everyone who might have been exposed to the disease. Soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, four are unconscious, and the “official” has fled . . .

Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives. One of the victims speaks, for all the victims, from the grave. We read the increasingly mad notes of one of the case detectives, the desperate letters of an American occupier, the testimony of a traumatized survivor. We meet a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an “occult detective,” a Soviet soldier, a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. (Knopf)

Someone tweeted a link to the New York Times review of this book, and I've been dying for it since. As you know, the setting is enough to interest me, but the review was amazing. Here's the last line, "It is hugely daring, utterly irresistible, deeply serious and unlike anything I have ever read." Tell me you don't want to read this book now!!!!

All of these books are available in stores now, so you don't have to wait! Go buy them or beg your library to get them, read them and come back and tell me how they are!

What books that are out right now do you want to read?