User Profile

Rev. Dr. Sir Wayne Murillo III

Wayne_Murillo@bookrastinating.com

Joined 1 year, 5 months ago

An anti-fascist, an anti-racist, and an egalitarian raccoon in a suit who reads books and writes about them.

He/Him/His

Mastodon: @Wayne_Murillo@kolektiva.social

This link opens in a pop-up window

Brit Bennett: The mothers (2016) 4 stars

"A dazzling debut novel from an exciting new voice, The Mothers is a surprising story …

Review of 'The mothers' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I found The Mothers after watching a Barnes and Noble Tik Tok suggesting it in a collection of books to use while processing and challenging the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe.

Thus, when I read it, I expected a narrative that would provided an unveiled, prochoice moral. The Mothers is so much more complex than that.

Bennett's debut novel is packed with dense, textured, realistic characters that leap off the page. A complex love triangle between Nadia Turner, Luke Sheppard, and Aubrey Evans weaves in and out of a tale that does include abortion, but also features black contemporary life, religion, class, and so much more.

The Mothers is worth your time.

Review of 'We Had a Little Real Estate Problem' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

If you'd like to know more about indigenous American comedy, Kliph Nesteroff chronicles some under-sung greats in We Had a Little Real-Estate Problem. The book is meandering and exclusively expository without a real thesis over content. Useful distraction for our current apocalypse.

Ken Liu, Hao Jingfang: Vagabonds (2020, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers) 5 stars

A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to …

Review of 'Vagabonds' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I have read many of the sprawling, science fiction, space operas that include Mars as a setting. I am often thrilled by the hardscrabble life and pragmatic philosophy that must be practiced on the red planet. However, for me, Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang sort of fell apart for me. I listened to the English translation from Chinese and perhaps objected to the lessons implied by the plot.

After a civil war between Mars and Earth, the two powers are attempting to find peace. Mars sends a group of students including Luoying, a dancer, to Earth to build relations between the planets.

Jingfang seems to wax poetic about the youth of Earth who seem to be trust-fund gig-workers that work to fund a lifestyle against the Martians who join a working group and help to build a community.

Jingfang's glorification of capitalism against a communist, semi-authoritarian, syndicalism just left this anarchistic, …

Laurie Frankel: This is how it always is (2017) 4 stars

"This is how a family keeps a secret...and how that secret ends up keeping them. …

Review of 'This is how it always is' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

ThisisHowitAlwaysIs by @Laurie_Frankel is a beautifully written novel covering #parenting, #trans-children, #family, and #myth. The beats of the story were tight and the tension kept me hanging on every moment. As a parent, I have wondered about how I would parent a trans-kid and Frankel's novel feels like a parental speculative fiction that lets the reader experience some of the inevitable obstacles that a family of a trans-child must overcome. I don't want to give a moment of it away.

This is How it Always Is by Frankel is beautiful and worth your time.

Torrey Peters: Detransition, Baby (Hardcover, 2021, One World) 5 stars

A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces …

Review of 'Detransition, Baby' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (@torreypeters) begins with a title that could be interpreted a couple of ways, something that doesn't change as the novel continues. After starting the book, someone empathetic to the rights of transgender people might have misgivings if the title is declarative. However, the title is the beginning of a chronological list of events in the life of James/Amy/Ames.

The novel proposes a situation where a ciswoman, and two transwomen, try to start a family while drama ensues. The story is compelling from the first minute to the last and it contains glorious dialectics between the characters that lead to greater truths about transpeople, motherhood, womanhood, and families that meld smoothly into the winding plot.

Detransition, Baby is worth your time. Go read it.

Daniel J. Siegel: No-drama discipline (2014) No rating

"[Offers] parents of children aged 2-13 a ... roadmap to ... discipline, highlighting the fascinating …

Review of 'No-drama discipline' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I started parenthood around the moment that the pandemic started. The lockdown and my maleness meant that I didn't really get a lot of in-person advice about parenting. I relied on books to be a father and equal parent to my child. One of my favorite books is The Whole Brain Child by Dr. Daniel Segal (@DrDanSiegel) and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson (@tinabryson). They wrote another book that I just finished: No Drama Discipline.

My kiddo is starting to gather her own will. I have been encountering all of the tantrums, demands, and hitting that you might expect. At first, I had no idea what to do. Then, No Drama Discipline and #GentleParenting Tik Tok helped me to develop a philosophy that guides my parenting actions to teach my child emotional regulation instead ugly pavlovian behavioral approaches.

I can't recommend No Drama Discipline enough for anyone that interacts with children, …

Amanda Oliver: Overdue (2022, Chicago Review Press, Incorporated) 5 stars

Review of 'Overdue' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

The library and the post office were once the most supported parts of federal government services in the United States. A fascist demagogue attacked USPS to attempt to keep a grip on the reigns of power. Religious fundamentalists and people against the free exchange of ideas have begun attacking librarians and libraries too.

But it wasn't always this way. If you love reading, you probably have strong positive feelings about the library. However, the modern existence of libraries isn't as you might remember from childhood.

During the pandemic, Amanda Oliver (@aelaineo) decided to get her complicated ideas about the library onto the page after a harrowing 6 years of experience in Washington DC's elementary school libraries and public libraries in DC that became day centers for houseless folks.

As a public educator, I really emphasized with Oliver's journey. The fall from the romantic vision of a profession before being smashed …

Barbara F. Walter: How Civil Wars Start (Hardcover, 2022, Crown) 5 stars

The influence of modern life on the civil wars, with an emphasis on grievance, faction …

Review of 'How Civil Wars Start' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

If you are feeling psychologically overwhelmed by the news and near the breaking point, don't read How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter (@bfwalter) or my summary until you have the space for it.

However, if you would like a primer on the political science about civil war and the implications in the United States aimed at an audience of lay-people, you found your book.

Most of Walter's arguments are couched in the scales that political scientists use to analyze states. The polity index scale measures a society's place between dictatorship (-10), anocracy (-5 to +5 | "an" = not, ocracy = government), and democracy (10+). After January 6th, the US fell from a +7 to a +5. After the transfer of power from Trump to Biden, the US is at a +8. The US has not been at a +5 since the 1800s. …

Review of 'In the Quick' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Many hard science fiction authors use the early Apollo astronauts as models for their characters. The trite pilot, cowboy, large-ego, insensitive, over-competitive, womanizing, straight, white, male space explorer isn't really accurate to real astronauts and a bore.

Kate Hope Day's (@katehopeday) In the Quick features June, a natural engineer whose skills are honed by her late uncle, Peter Reed. June's coming-of-age arc is fascinating. Most of the plot is driven by a McGuffin: a fuel cell worked on by students and guided by Reed.

However, the book just stops at the end without a satisfying end of the plot arc. I have heard that In the Quick had literary parallels to Jane Eyre by Jane Austin, but these superficial similarities don't really solve the problem in the book.

In the Quick feels feminist without deeper philosophical notes, it doesn't have the comedy or detail of hard science fiction like The …

Sequoia Nagamatsu: How High We Go in the Dark (Hardcover, 2022, William Morrow) 4 stars

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …

Review of 'How High We Go in the Dark' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Sequoia Nagamatsu's (@SequoiaN) How High We Go in the Dark is a dark, haunting, and insightful pandemic novel of short stories that rotate the protagonist role through an ensemble of characters. Each short story is a beautiful piece of literary speculative fiction that helps the reader to digest the grief and horror of the pandemic and find something to build hope upon.

When I reached the story about the euthanasia theme park for terminally-ill children, I was ready to put it down, but some of his metaphors started to land and drove me through the rest of the book.

Kim Stanley Robinson: The High Sierra (Hardcover, 2022, Little, Brown and Company) 5 stars

Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. …

Review of 'The High Sierra' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Since reading Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), I have become obsessed with his books. I have read the Mars Trilogy several times and found new and interesting details each time. I am also a Midwest-based outdoors-person and lover of mountains.

KSR's Sierra book is beautiful. His discussions on Muir and the conservation of the range are interspersed with gear philosophy, life advice for outdoors people, and the stories that are swapped when outdoors-people start talking.

I was just thrilled to learn that my obsession with KSR's work and mountains are intertwined in a way that seems obvious in hindsight. So many physical descriptions in his books are inspired by the Sierra.

The highest complement that I can pay this book is that it has helped to inspire me to start an outdoor project to inspire my daughter to love the outdoors in the rivers and forests I grew up …

Philipp Dettmer: Immune (Hardcover, 2021, Random House) 4 stars

A gorgeously illustrated deep dive into the immune system that will forever change how you …

Review of 'Immune' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

If you have spent some time on Youtube, you have watched at least one beautifully produced Kurzgesagt (@Kurz_Gesagt), German for in a Nutshell, video. Youtube is packed with science communicators, but the beauty and humor of Kurzgesagt videos is hard to beat.

In 2021, Philip Dettmer released Immune. After more than a decade of interest in the topic, he released it in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic; he has shockingly good timing.

The Immune audiobook is narrated by Steve Taylor, but the beautiful illustrations in the book should make you want to reach for a ebook or even a hardcover.

Immune's extended metaphors and allegories help even the least scientifically trained folks like myself to start to grasp a shockingly complex topic, which is something that I should have expected.

I also should have expected the "in a nutshell" guy to write "in a nutshell" a lot. The …