THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE by Fiona Hill

I read most of this memoir over Thanksgiving weekend because it's overdue and I have another book, Yours Cruelly, Elvira, due tomorrow but I have a feeling I won't be able to renew it, and my library is holding a novel, The Perfect Nanny, until today (I can't pick up holds if I have an overdue library book).

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century is good — I give it three stars out of five. Interesting reading about her growing up in northeast England, pretty much the equivalent of America's flyover states, or as Chris Hedges likes to call it, "a sacrifice zone." Fascinating how far she's come from being a coal miner's daughter to being embedded in the deep state. Remarkable how many luck breaks she got growing up from educational opportunities to applying for grants to cover room and board.

A couple things turned me off. First, she uses the word populist as a pejorative and not once did she refer to Trump as a fascist wannabe. And, second, she strikes me as belonging to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party with its myth of meritocracy; if I was a betting man, I'd say she voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Makes sense: if you get a Ph.D. from Harvard, you're most likely going to embrace the Matrix. I kinda give her pass, though, given her quasi-poverty childhood.

THE STRAYS by Emily Bitto

Wow, what a debut novel! I give it 4.5 stars out of 5. I've always been infatuated with Australia, so I opened this book a little biased. It's mostly set in 1930s Melbourne at a commune for avant-garde artists. SPOILER!: I probably would have given it 5 stars, but the two sisters running off with the one artist seemed a little cliched and predictable. But that's a minor quibble. First, Nancy Tucker's First Day of Spring, and now this novel. Is 2021 the year for debut novels by women? (Yeah, yeah, yeah, a kind of a cheat 'cuz Bitto's book came out in 2017.)

ABBA: Voyage

Hard to believe it's been 40 years since ABBA's last album. I was a little hesitant to purchase Voyage because pop stars don't age well. Boy, was I wrong. I'm keeping 5 of the 10 songs on this allegedly final album:

• "I Still Have Faith in You": The formula still works!
• "Don't Shut Me Down": Love that sound around the 40-second mark.
• "Just a Notion": Apparently it was written during the Voulez-Vous sessions. My, how it shows! It's got the energy and imagination of youth.
• "Keep an Eye on Dan": Another up-tempo number.
• "No Doubt About It": Ninth track, but I end the album/EP here with the misheard last line of "This is where it ends".

Props to the Swedish pop stars for putting out this album. Nice epilogue to their catalog, since their previous two albums, Super Trouper and The Visitors, sounded pretty forced.

WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams

I tried reading this back in my twenties but couldn't get into it, so I picked it up recently. About halfway through, I stopped reading it for a few days because I started researching getting a rabbit by reading stuff online and watching The Bunny Lady and Lennon the Bunny's YouTube videos. Though I'm probably gonna have to wait until I move into a new apartment in July because rabbit piss or poop attracts mice, and I got enough problems with those rodents as it is (one of my glue traps ensnared a mouse Thursday night — didn't see it until 10 AM, Fri. morning, as it crawled across my carpet).

Anyhoo, I give the novel 2.5 stars outta 5. I didn't care for the campfire tales the rabbits told. The rest of the story was OK. I dunno, after the Watership Down warren escapes from General Woundmort, if I wrote it, the final act would have had something different instead of Woundmort tracking down Watership Down and attacking them. Glad I read it, though. . . .

Silence Is a Dangerous Sound: A Tribute to Fugazi

Took a while for me to get through this comp. I bought it back on Sept. 30 and didn't listen to it for the fifth time until the other night (I had been listening to it only when exercising). I'm keeping 7 out of the 44 tracks. Main reason is that Fugazi's versions in a lot of instances are better than the covers. Still, I don't regret buying it. The 7 tracks I'm keeping got a good flow. Here's what I'm keeping:

1. "Bad Mouth" by Authority Zero: Standard cover but a rocking way to kick the comp off.

3. "KYEO" by Dowsing: Love Fugazi's version but I bought two of Dowsing's albums, so I have to keep this song

8. "Target" by Batteries: I own almost everything by this bis side project. This rendition is traditional with Batteries' unique twist on it.

18. "Runaway Return" by Chamberlain: I didn't care for this song when I heard it on Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing, but Chamberlain make that riff stick in my head like an unforgettable jingle.

21. "Brendan #1" by Seas, Starry: They rework this instrumental where it sounds almost nothing like the original. That's a good thing.

33. "Suggestion" by Jonah Matranga: Pretty cool mellow, electronic rendition of this crowd favorite from Fugazi's 13 Songs.

44. "Arpeggiator" by Ripcord Records: Nice electronic cover of this instrumental. Glad I downloaded the album when I bought it the day it came out. Looks like they've since taken that song down.

ALONE IN A DOME by The Copyrights

After picking up Teenage Bottlerocket's Sick Sesh!, I was a little hesitant to check out this other new release on Fat Wreck Chords because TBR only had 5 great tracks out of 12. It's good to be wrong. Alone in a Dome is the best thing they've done since 2008's Learn the Hard Way, and it's a marked improvement over their previous album, the inconsistent Report. Every song on Dome is awesome, and the sequencing is spot-on! I don't buy everything The Copyrights put out, partly because a lot of their songs sound the same, especially with the singer's voice, but Dome mixes thing up enough. $8 well spent . . . I just wish the lyrics came with the digital download at Fat, or were over at Bandcamp!