Book of the Tube of You

Youtube, the video frontier; this is the voyage of one man completing a Creative Writing assignment.  My mission:  To sort through the endless number of booktubers and determine in my opinion which dos not suck.

So as I begin my voyage, my meandering drive stalls and I procrastinate, with a cold bug nipping at my hind quarters and my mind set on Calculating derivatives, I felt little to no energy to devote to watching youtube for I need all my mental capacities to fend off the sniffles and the Calculus blues.

That was until I was faced with my arch nemesis: TIME!!!! 

Seriously though, I have to admit, this was not something I would normally be a big fan of.  I enjoy hearing others opinions but I usually can gauge from conversations about this that and nothing of what we might have in common.  Such as someone telling me that they like Twilight.  I can tell that we are not going to have too much in common when it comes to what we are going to read.

Call me strange, but for the most part I stopped reading young adult stuff when I was 14.  Guess what?  Booktubers love it.  I imagine that some might even marry their favorites novels.  Let this be a story about a shy young woman and some guy with a faux hawk and an eating disorder and apparently the legs of their imagination spread like some love starve harlot in a Super 8 motel.

Now before you get too terribly offended, let me say this: I am merely posting my opinion on the matter, I am hardly an authority on anything of the sorts and those who are writing these books have vivid imagination, a thought for young love, and a less jaded romance life than me.  I am more of a fan of body counts versus romance (sex) counts.  Yes I am speaking ill of the character Anita Blake (seriously is one of her powers the ability to avoid STD’s whilst engaging in numerous orgies in one night?), she just don’t love herself.

Also if I am to be completely clear and honest I feel this way about many books from different genres, but the first three Booktubers I watched told me about their young adult romance picks of the year.  Now call it the lack of oxygen getting to my brain, or the numbers that ain’t numbers running through my head, but somewhere it flipped the switch of oh dear god.

With a clearer mind now I say, enjoy what you enjoy, and be damned the grumpy guy who reads the art of war because it seems like a reasonable life strategy. Oh yeah whilst I am in a mood of oh dear god why, for those who actually read the Simarillion and enjoyed it, HOW?  Reading the Simarillion to me is like sky diving without a parachute to save a life; a daring and noble cause but ends up being a damn tragedy in the end.

Ah but I digress, onward back to the meander drive, wander factor four.  Fourth Booktuber; Danny “I’m a Smartass” Marks.  The first thing I watched from him was him vandalizing his own young adult novel.  In my mind I said, “Wil, this guy’s got some potential.  He just drilled a hole through his book and is painting it black.”  This man also referred to himself as a whore.  I laughed, I laughed a lot.  I had finally put my imagination out on the corner.

His book shelf tour was a tour of his shelf he labeled adult that he was promising to read for the New Year.  He had a lot horror books in his 24 book promise and some science fiction along with detective stories.  I heard a bell chime in the distance as an angel got its wings, or maybe it was the music I was listening to.

He never really mentioned any of his favorite characters, but he was quite prolific about his favorite book covers and book covers that he just didn’t like at all.  I think he has a thing against the color pink.  As far as wrap-ups went I didn’t come across those but he does do something call his weekly agenda which is basically ever two or three days he announces an agenda and he tells you of what books he plans to read and things he thinks about doing in the week.

 Didn’t note any book clubs he was a part of but then again I didn’t watch all of his videos either, but that seems hardly the point really.  What I enjoy is his ability to tell why he enjoys the books he does and make fun of himself and things that go with it.  I feel like that if you enjoy something then you can find a way to make yourself laugh at your own obsession.

There is not big productions to his videos, he has semi-neat book shelves behind him seems to really enjoy what he is doing.  However I have noticed that with a lot of the booktubers, they do these jumpy edits in their videos, that go on directly to the next topic without a transition or a lead in.  this is only slightly distracting to me, but I can deal.

Most booktubers seem to be about their hauls.  Their weekly book splurges that they intend to read, but as Danny Marks says he buys a lot of books and only reads some of them.  They are also big on waiting for their favorite authors to release books and how they look forward to seeing their favorite books be made into movies.  No harm in that I think.  Hey when they first said there was going to be a Lord of the Rings franchise in live action, I was more than a little happy.

Personally I don’t think I could be a booktuber.  There is that whole thing of time; I just sometimes don’t feel like I have a lot of it.  Then there comes the reviewing of books.  It is easy to tell my friends that I wouldn’t read something and exactly why and give it some choice comparisons with cleaning parts of a bulls anatomy with it, but to tell that to a few hundred or thousands of people that book sucks and why.  That is a level of truth that I feel like should not be served on a global scale.

All and all I think there is a general need for folks who do this sort of thing.  If you find someone who reads a lot of the same books as you then you are going to tend to gravity towards the books they read if they tell you that they are good books to read.  And sometimes a little push towards something you may not have heard of or may not have tried might deliver you to a new level of enjoyment.