The three hundred and seventy-sixth album: #376 The Stranglers - Rattus Norvegicus
Rattus Norvegicus is one of the biggest punk albums from its era and I feel I can see why. There's the anger and frustration in the lyrics that comes in with the work, the vulgarity that appeals on a base level, but it also stays accessible, a lot of it being the daily life 'concerns' - including partying, sex and arguments with (girl)friends - that would get people interested, but also with an observational style that now seems to comment on that lifestyle a bit - the fact that there's a track about Nostradamus' predictions for Toulouse indicates that depth and whether it's the accent or the music, the sarcasm seems heavy in places. Whether my reading is intentional or not, that reading combined with the deeper concepts that some tracks explore make the album worth a listen.
The ninety-sixth book: #76 Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Maturin
I felt repeatedly a step behind the novel when reading Melmoth the Wanderer. It delights in its stories within stories, interrupting them Arabian Nights style to diverge, but using a cast of characters that I had difficulty keeping track of. Perhaps it's because the core conceit that I thought we got first - an immortal figure wandering the earth - barely comes up, and instead there's a long diversion about monastery life that I mentally checked out off... but then finding out it felt like part of a longer story that I then got lost in when it started mixing in even more stories. With every story initially being a clean slate, with its own set of characters, and in this case a detailed world that I'm not familiar enough with to just get, it got disorienting, and I'll admit I'd lost interest soon enough hoping we'd get some bits that connected back to the original concept. When it happened, though, it never grabbed me and I found myself unwilling to invest the time needed to get to know the story better. It's too far removed from what's interesting to me that it just came down to whether the start of each story grabbed me.