This Week in Booktube: August 30, 2026
(These are the Booktube videos I watched this week. As always, I encourage you also to check out each of the videos I've linked to down below. Support Booktube. And let me know what you've watched this past week.)
Abby Reads "Hinterlands" by William Gibson | A 5P Review
Bucky749 Booktube: role of booktuber Booktag
Bucky749 Filsinger games pick up legends pick up ep. 2
Abby Reads The Role of a BookTuber Tag | Reader, Reviewer, Reading Buddy
Marian H This Book Hurt to Read - Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Books I'm Not Reading Re-thinking Monetization on Booktube
Twelve Months of Christmas Movie vs. Book christmasedition! Christmas Kranks vs. Skipping Christmas. Did the Book Prevail?
Abby Reads "Everything on a Waffle" by Polly Horvath | A 5P Review
3 comments:
Ah, William Gibson, the guy who wrote Neuromancer that was the founding father of the cyberpunk or whatever the name of the genre is. I remember having glanced at some pages of the pdf then got disinterested during the phase of trying to explore Western literature online. Back then I had some sudden thought it would be cool for me if I decided to like Sci-Fi just to realise the scifi I love tend to happen to be Japanese whose scifi elements in some ways happen to be magic, and if I already wanted to read hard scifi might well just read Griffiths' "Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Physics" (I do actually recommend that book for people who want some history and or big pictures) and be done with it. I put him on the category of Tim Berners-Lee (if that's his name) - big deals who I'm not even sure have done anything really more important than their names. Other than that he hates Singapore (4repressive6him it seems) which makes him seems more notable than his book does to me.
Far as I see cyberpunk the genre only seems to be when you put some neon lamps on the wall and then call some girls to your room to pay them and have seth with then you already have the genre of cyberpunk. I don't get why people seem to love this genre so much making a fuss with some anime whose characters are just insufferable and have ugly haircut but perhaps thoseare the charms for western audience. reminds me of philips k dick whose characters in his novels seem to be just like his name and he iirc or that bald big three guy was the one who ended my streak of reading scifi as I don't finish scifi i don't like. oh wait there's two balds and even both of them seem to be repressed homosexuals so im talking about the 2001 guy who let kubrick adapted his novel into something equally bad and unwatchable. anyway what was i saying? dick sucks and vice versa, because i read some pages of some of his books. i did read dream sheep which was quite good somehow iirc but don't remember why i dnf'd. but what i was having in mind was how the likes of gibson makes it really understandable why publishers in my country don't publish many translated western books as they still need to test the water and they wouldn't want to sell something tht doesn't sell so i shouldn't have complained about "oh why country doesn't have as many translated notable western names". although a lot of faults can be blamed on publishers who now refuse to rewrite texts to localize they have to stick to some stupid copyright and stuff that doesn't allow translators to make the texts understandable
>Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Physics
Since I already namedropped this book by accident, let me have some further few words on it in case somebody actually tried to get it out of a random internet recommendation:
It's sort of a mini textbook that tries to give you a big picture of modern physics by telling you how the physical breakthroughs happened - what were the issues and historical context/background that gave rise to such concepts; what do those concepts intuitively mean (Griffiths explains things really well - and in fact he has already authored several really well-written university physics books that seem to be used for some MIT OCW courses as well, they have good reputation.)
I do recommend this book because it may manage to teach people what the physics they couldn't manage to learn at high school were all about and wouldn't want to learn any further (relativity, quantum physics, some astrophysics). This book doesn't require calculus. Although people don't really need to do the exercises to get values out of it - I barely did a single exercise.
I think it's also great for people who want a no-nonsense coffee table book while still want to have some actual conceptual understanding of the terms those nerds love to throw around when they talk about quantum physics.
I find the book really valueable as my high school curriculum taught plenty of advanced stuff about Bohr's model of atoms and radiation decay and plenty enough of stuff, but stidents like myself still came out being clueless about what it all was other than just... well, physics. I think internet discourses over here really show how a lot of people when they managed to pick up on English internet talks then even managed to have some misconception about how quantum mechanics made classical mechanics obsolete. I think this really shows how lacking everybody is of the big picture of all the physics stuff they learned. Commie education system just simply assumes students are supposed to go on and keep learning all the most advanced physics stuff. With a good big picture though you can decide whether the subject is interesting enough to go on and learn deeper or not, or people can finally say "Okay, I know what I was taught now, but I think what I learned are sufficient for me and I don't have a demand to know further now" - something that is just really lacking over this side of the ocean.
I just looked up Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Physics on Google. It said it was a good book for people who want to understand physics without dealing with the math. I don't usually read a lot of popular science books, but... I don't know, I might just check it out if I ever come across it. Thanks for the recommendation.
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