This Week in Booktube: May 10, 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.)
Randy Ray How to Read Every Day (Even if You're Busy)
Bucky749 American samurai review 1
Bucky749 Book tag book number tag
Abby Reads The BookTube Number Tag
jim's books reading & stuff The Booktube Numbers Tag (origìnal).... un booktag muy chulo
William's Library The Apocrypha (part 2)
Abby Reads "Onion John" by Joseph Krumgold | A 5P Review
Bucky749 Thrifting : my library used books picked up.
3 comments:
It's sad that the internet hates jokes but prefers to feature angry stuff instead. It's really tempting for me to post lame jokes on Reddit but I can't, knowing that my comments will catch 69 downvotes, all the meanwhile bland repetitive jokes as well as intellectual comments or insults dressed as jokes will have countless interactivity.
Anyway I was reminded of a postmodern novel called Infinite Jest out of nowhere - a name I haven't seen on some literature corner I frequented for a while. I thought there's nothing unexplored about Western literature for me until the novel came to my mind so I tried to read it a bit. The foreword is lengthy but straightforward enough: okay this will be that pomo novel that is difficult but not that difficult, and DFW himself has written easy to read essays. Okay good to know. The very first page however is enough of a clincher to make me decide on not reading anymore (unless I have Infinite Time to read Infinite Jest, which doesn't seem to be a possibility in my lifetime).
Issue is the author's writing style of using vague words to describe whatever happening, pomo style, or stream-of-consciousness if using inconcrete words is a way to do what Nabokov called spreading your legs wide and lowering your head down and looking through between the two legs [1]. Anyway, trying to comprehend them is not something that bothers me the ESL too much. Trying to read a style that made my English got called "lacking grammars" or "verbal diarrhea" when I tried to imitate it isn't something I find worthy these days. Having the tendency to use vague words seeps in me is just destructive - careers need verbal or written clarity, and being influenced by the postmodernists is something I can no longer afford whereas they likely don't even need to find a job that would force them to use precise language.
[1] Lectures on Literature - Nabokov.
As for what I have been watching lately: nothing related to books, let alone booktube. But I have been watching a lot of videos of tabby cats loafing and meowing. Very cute!
>angry stuff (anger-inducing stuff)
Either my English is getting worse or it has always been that bad.
But well, this is the age of Globish anyway. And like I once indirectly imparted to my British client: hard to use a language well when it's not like the user learned it out of their own volition, hard to manage to grasp the soul of the language when the learner isn't attracted to doing that (not even mentioning the aversion).
I have to confess, I've never read any DFW. Although I often enjoy Steve Donoghue complaining about it. (It will sometimes come up on his Q&A videos.) Perhaps one of these days I'll try out Infinite Jest.
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