This Week in Booktube: March 22, 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.)
Joseph Francis Burton I do the Non-Fiction book tag!!
Steve Donoghue Ryan Holiday's 26 Rules for Reading: A Very Belated Response!
Steve Donoghue Epic Comic Book Wednesday: The Dark Knight Returns
Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty
Tell Tale Books Stephen King 69: The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands | Review
Mindy's Book Journey Cold Snap Book Review
jim's books reading & stuff 1 min review: Christine by Stephen King
Derek Green Is there a literacy crisis? Response
Joseph Francis Burton A Haven, by Joris-Karl Huysmans - book discussion
Steve Donoghue Star Trek Starfleet Academy Season 1: Review
Bucky749 TMNT Talk : Rennet: (tmnt’s doctor who )
Randy Ray Patience with and for Booktube: A Response to Steve Donoghue
Steve Donoghue Having Patience with (and on) BookTube!
3 comments:
Instead of opening then closing the page again and again, I might well let out the comment. This is a dead horse even if I don't feel bad about beating again and again I still find ultimately pointless. But even if there's zero to nil merit, I might well get it off my mind.
Literacy crisis is always dependent on people's moods after all - it's a thing whenever somebody is in a bad mood. Not sure if I should be glad I'm not born in some countries like China or in Europe, where people actually do look up to the classics and may even force their own children (at least way back then) to read all those stuff.
I still remember when I was naive and read online stuff about American "literacy crisis". I thought it was interesting that the U.S, despite being an advanced high-tech country, also had the issue of people not reading and whatnot (and yet people in the U.S still seem to read much as well as being literate more than many other countries).
Fast forward years later, by the time I got attuned to Western rhetorics and what they really say, I realize two things:
1 is that people everywhere are similar in the basic respects - there will be those that love to read and there will be those that see no purpose in doing that;
2 is that all the alarming talks about literacy crisis is the very Vietnamese village chicken house equivalent of parents and teachers btching about students/children not slaving themselves hard enough at all.
Along the line things can be said about attention span. There are things that should be paid full attention to; there are things that are only worth paying attention to here and there; there are things that aren't worth paying attention to at all. The only reason I will return to any school at all will be to take tests to get degrees and certs, not to pay attention to lectures by people who don't even care if what they are teaching sound coherent at all.
Literary crisis is never a thing over this side of the Earth. But on the other hand the parents will never stop having issues with their own children being lazy and not learning constantly. Maybe this is something that isn't exclusive to the chopsticks economies, but even if so I still fail to see any other culture that has the very tendency to berate and degrade and dehumanize their own kinds, their own children on a breathing basis for failing to exhibit how special they must be. Worst, their own (the parents, but could be anybody) worldviews must always be right and their own children (or other people) must always be assumed the worst - and thus there's nothing wrong about adults dictating _every_ single thing the children do for the sake of molding them into better people.
At the very least the notion of letting students read whatever as long as they like them is still something people in the West recognize as valid (agree with it or not). The Asiatic worldview may just dismiss its very own existence and insists that there's no way other than the official way of school drilling.
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...but then again this is uncalled to bring up some primitive cultures in the Far East. I can complain all day, but let me digress.
I did watch Derek's video :) (even though his points seemed unfocused and more relevant to U.S audience).
Speaking for myself, I was really lucky to discover Japanese 2D culture.
It changed my life to say the least.
Back then, I was absolutely enthralled by the cool video game formats and cute illustrations some Japanese genre put out. So I decided to try them out, to waste tremendous hours on those novel games - even if my English at that time wasn't even enough to catch the gist of what the texts were even saying (those games had English translations).
At some point it became hard to keep reading manga and watching anime without knowing English - as the number of materials translated into my own language wasn't many at all. It's quite nostalgic thinking back of when I tried to read English-translated manga and even got scared of the lengthy texts on the panels due to flimsy English.
At some point I also discovered some English website about anime.
What people wrote as comments didn't make sense. But there was many cool things about the site, and I browsed it for plenty of the valuable Japanese culture related stuff.
I eventually managed to make sense of the natural logic of the English they used there. I didn't even know it was supposed to be an American website, and what "Western" was supposed to mean meaningfully.
One thing led to others, my English really improved a lot. I pivoted to read about many different knowledge on the English side of the internet. You may even say I wouldn't bother to read a lot of books without some community piqued my interests into other things - I wouldn't have read Pinker, Dawkins, about Chomsky, et cetera otherwise.
And ultimately, I also decided and managed to learn Japanese. I started learning it at 8th grade and it already felt like I could have learned it sooner, if not for my hesitations and misgivings about learning a language for no career prospect aim in mind. But I just tried to learn with what I could have my hands on, even if there were plenty of handicaps and hurdles.
...so I don't know if any of this means anything to anybody at all.
But perhaps being able to read what you love may lead to really nice things.
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