This Week in Booktube: September 6, 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 "Madame, Or . . ." by Madeleine L'Engle | A 5P Review
Michael Fitzgerald Troy SUPERMAN V. BLOODSPORT by JOHN BYRNE
Marian H Why Is 1984 More Popular than Brave New World?
Twelve Months of Christmas Book VS. Movie: Journey Back to Christmas. Which One Wins?
5 comments:
Weekly whine. I don't mind people over here telling me some recommended way of learning *roll eyes* English (yes people who barely bothered to communicate with a foreigner before they even give advice) or how I should try to talk to foreigners or how (just now) I should not be so careless that I could forget, a language, I use at least for the purpose of reading, on a daily basis.
What really (and perhaps deeply) irks me is how it didn't even seem to get into their very minds my virtual visceral dislike for this language (not really the English language itself, perhaps more like the process of learning it or other experiences). I remember I was being quite dramatic when I intensely pointed to my own chest crying about my own victimhood of having to go through the accursed process right before their very face though? Or did they think I was joking when I repeatedly tell them to put away or better yet throw away some certificate frame that congratulated me on being able to pass some competitions actual natives may find to be more like a joke that writes itself?
Another thing I have to whine is how my experience of working for an outsource colony of Microsoft makes me realise how it's virtually or literally impossible to do a good job of providing good customer service at all. But even if somebody wants to hear and I still feel like letting out and if it's not completely irrelevant to anything, then I still think perhaps none of this matters at all ultimately. Besides the reasons for that, if people do care, are stuff people can already make a lot of correct speculative guesses even if vague.
I have seen people with better Duolingo streaks than me trying not to whine at all. Maybe to be a little bit more on topic I read through Deuteronomy which is just a recap of the previous books with Moses being a commander in chief now. Quite a nice book for the fans of masculine wars stuff - sometimes it's quite nice to see the Bible trying to be inclusive, not sure if I have ever mentioned how my mind even managed to liken Genesis to some Chinese wuxia. It's always nice to have the holy books being host on Github one of the only sites I am allowed to access at the company. Other than I leafed through some pages of the 2nd chapter of the compiler dragon book and the phrases like Context-Free Grammar hit my mind with a possible experiment that and perhaps that could be a nice way to test how much a person deep down actually hate Chomsky by whispering those magic words and see if they want to vomit things that aren't in their stomach or maybe have the eyes of having gone through the battle of Khe Sanh. Maybe for those care about politics or psychology or linguistics the name of Chomsky makes them conjure a feeling or sense of justice or courage or kindness. I do love to imagine those with only CS books on their hands would feel when they see his name as much sense as the pages of the dragon book itself: senselessness. I swear if the sentences on those pages of the book can't just substitute for the examples Chomsky made on his Syntactic Structure book as sentences that are grammatical but make no sense, then I don't know what other kind of sentences could be illustrative at all. (Substitute dragon book with Sipser and it's the same). Maybe it's truly time for me to switch to smuts instead.
Oh and I hate my culture. But then again this is hardly a new thing to say or what so bad about it are in some ways quite known even if only tacitly. (Still fun to rediscover a new dimension of how bad it is for everyday I interact with the people).
I know we've talked before about The Linguistics Wars book. Did you ever manage to track down and read a copy? I think you would really enjoy it.
Having a physical copy here is just problematic (it's already a surprise to see actual academic or technical classics being in library or at a price people can afford while still saying how extremely expensive it is) so I had to resort to the "typical" way. But yes, the book (or actually 2 editions) are great read even though what I have managed to read are partial. I actually wanted to mention on some comment section how you could even use the 2nd edition to tell your children stories of that man Chomsky who did a lot of incredible things alongside a lot of juicy gossipy stuff - the book/2nd edition is valuable for containing such gems that aren't easy to find digging through just online resources (and needless to say AI given that AI models are only allowed to be trained on Wikipedia tier of public stuff).
Although I remember you mentioned on the review how the book would explain the linguistics a lot and I didn't remember seeing that - could be mostly my fault as a lay reader who skipped most of those portions of the book. Although I think I still managed to get some historical outline from the 2 editions with the structuralists and/or Bloomfieldians got upthrown, Chomsky's theories about language changed a lot (I first caught on to the phrase people also managed to latch on as if buzzword = Universal Language from this book), Postal or somebody's suppose novel theory or idea that just has the MERGE - but all this could be saying I didn't manage to retain a lot (if I read the actual important portions at all) and came out with the idea it's hard to know what they have managed to do to advance the field at all. Maybe I'm the type who prefers to absorb explanations from primary literature or standard textbooks - I think I had a clearer idea of what Chomsky was trying to do when I read his own words in Syntactic Structures (turned out to have a Vietnamese translation in a library, I also found another interesting small book that contains a history of structuralism and how it seemed to meet its inevitable demise) even if SS is the very prime example of something written in plain language that can still come across as hard to comprehend.
IDK how what I know about his influence on 'theory of computer science' (quite a fancy and broad name for something that only revolves around some dang Turing machine) didn't come much from the book. Not sure if I missed those parts when I read Linguistic Wars but my gut just keeps telling me there's isn't much - although I do suspect I really missed those parts since I remembered some other online review of a linguist disputed the part the author claimed Chomsky is a superstar in CS. His accursed name is hard to avoid if CS students had some theoretical course that touched on automata theory or something along the line (if one never saw Chomsky hierarchy then I wonder if people ever omitted his name from Chomsky normal form). Apparently CS people came across Chomsky's linguistic stuff somehow and found those useful to incorporate into whatever CS stuff - and I'm not sure how useful those are given how I am not the only person who complains about how come compiler textbooks have to contain such incomprehensible theories which imply writing a computer compiler must be really advanced (it doesn't have to given how there have been books or guides that stripped it down to the practical coding parts mostly).
Sounds like you got at least as much out of that book as I did. Glad you were able to find it in some form at least.
I have to confess I know nothing about Computer Science. But I do remember my Computer Science friends back in University used to complain about Chomsky a lot!
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