The twenty-fourth album: #24 Joan Baez - Joan Baez
A simple folk album, Joan Baez creates a simple but very listenable album. The lyrics are meaningful and it sounds good, warmth coming through in the often sad-sounding vocals. Most of it is accompanied by guitar alone, which works incredibly well in creating the atmosphere of the album.
They are mostly from the standard song book, but adapted to her voice, Joan Baez makes them hers, fititing it to make it sound great. It's amaazing, in a way, how modern it sounds - you can still find singer-songwriters like it these days. I'ts nice, and is probably part of what makes it so easy to listen to these days.
The twenty-first book: #21 Oroonoko - Aphra Behn
It's interesting reading this not too long after watching Roots. Superficially, the main characters of both are similar - proud warriors stolen from Africa to be sold as slaves, both from time to time with a rebellious streak. The differences make this book weirder to our modern eyes. Oroonoko - or Caesar, a slave name that gets accepted the moment it's introduced - is the prince and future king of a people destroyed as the westeners come in. He gets tricked into boarding a slaver's galley and becomes a slave. Once he gets there, however, he quickly accepts his fate, only protesting when his owners become too cruel - leading to his death. It's all very accepting of something we find reprehensible nowadays, something at odds with the love story it tries to tell.
What doesn't help here is that the novel doesn't have many conflicts. There's the point where the main character (I hesitate to use the word hero, as he isn't really written to be one) becomes a slave, and the one that leads to his death at the end, but beyond that it feels superficial. It's an interesting insight to people's thoughts at the time, a contemporary look that gives some idea of what was going on, but in the end it feels a bit too distant from us to work as a 'slice of life' kind of thing.