My 2019 Reading Wrap-Up

Over the past couple of years, I have documented every film that I have watched and reviewed them all using Letterboxd. As a way to motivate myself to read more, I thought I would do the same for what books I have been reading, using Goodreads as a way to set myself a reading challenge every year.

After doubling my goal of 10 books last year (since I went on honeymoon and managed to read a book a day!), I thought I would keep my goal to 20 books this year. However, just missed out on this target, but I was ever so close to making it.

Here’s how my 2019 challenge went, with a short review and rating for each of the books that I read:

Documentary Review: The Innocent Man (Netflix)

The Innocent Man is an American true-crime documentary television series based on John Grisham‘s 2006 book The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town which debuted on Netflix in December 2018. The series follows the true story of a small-town justice gone terribly awry, revolving around the conviction of former major league star Ron Williamson from Ada, Oklahoma for the murder of a 21-year-old cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter in 1982. The crime wasn’t solved for five years, when Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz were finally arrested and charged with capital murder. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. But the reasons why were never clear. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. The book details the facts around the case up until 1999 when, after serving 11 years on death row, Ron was exonerated by DNA evidence by the Innocence Project and released from prison.

Book Review: The Innocent Man

“This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same—bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defence lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.”

Written by John Grisham, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 non-fiction book based on the true story of a small-town justice gone terribly awry. The case revolves around the conviction of former major league star Ron Williamson from Ada, Oklahoma for the murder of a 21-year-old cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter in 1982. The crime wasn’t solved for five years, when Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz were finally arrested and charged with capital murder. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. But the reasons why were never clear. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. The book details the facts around the case up until 1999 when, after serving 11 years on death row, Ron was exonerated by DNA evidence by the Innocence Project and released from prison.