Say Nothing(2018) by Patrick Radden Keefe

 The Top 100 Books of the 21st Century: New York Times

Say Nothing: 

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018)

by Patrick Radden Keefe

#19

   I visited Belfast over the Christmas/New Years Holiday period last year.  While I was there, I took a "black cab" tour where a local takes you on a tour of both sides of Belfast- Catholic and Protestant.   You see plenty of murals, and it's clear that conflict by proxy continues- the Catholic side is filled with Palestinian flags and the Protestant side with Israeli flags.  Keefe's account of the "troubles" which is a period in Northern Ireland history that generally corresponds to the time between the 1960's and the dawn of the Good Friday agreement signed in 1998,  has been hailed as a classic, and its inclusion on the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century- I think as the only non-American history book on the list... and the recent Hulu television version.

   I listened to the Audio book, and it works well in that format, since much of the writing seems to come from transcribed interviews.  The major narrative thrust beyond documenting the historical facts involved (from the perspective of the Catholic side) involves the fate of a handful of "disappeared" including a single mother of seven children- Keefe's desire to "solve" these disappearances is the tension-inducing narrative device that elevates Say Nothing above an ambitious oral history.

Sounder (1969) by William H. Armstrong

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sounder (1969)

by William H. Armstrong

Bartow County, Georgia

Georgia: 3/26

  I guess it isn't so hard to imagine at time when a book that uses the "n" word like a comma could not only be a children's book but also a prize winning children's book, is as the case with Sounder, about the son of share-cropper who is hauled off to a Georgia prison after he is accused of stealing a ham to feed his impoverished family.  Sounder is just a slip of a book, 116 pages, so it had that going for it, and also the fact that it wasn't a YA issue based novel published in the last decade, which are truly the most insufferable titles in the 1,001 Novels list.