If you’re under 25, a romance reader and a TikTok user, you’re bound to have encountered ‘BookTok’. The side of the app with millions of users that seems to have revitalised a percentage of young women that haven’t been this excited to read since it was 2014 and girls were being sold to One Direction on Wattpad (if you know, you know).
BookTok has gained such a big influence on the literary industry that even if you don’t meet any of the criteria stated above, you’re bound to have seen the gigantic ‘TikTok Made Me Read It’ sign in Waterstones. I honestly believe that it has made thousands of people fall in love with books which is definitely a positive aspect of it.
But while I enjoy light, silly romance books, it seems like only reading those and limiting yourself to fanfic-quality fiction is also the motto of this online community. One example that quickly comes to mind is Colleen Hoover, who most recently went viral for her book ‘It Ends With Us’, which was adapted into a film starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. This book discusses generational domestic abuse, and had the potential to become a hard-hitting, educational YA movie that could have a positive impact on young women worldwide. Instead, Hoover’s production glamorised abuse, with songs like ‘Cherry’ by Lana Del Rey, who has long been criticised for idealising abuse and toxic relationships with her lyrics – ‘he hit me and it felt like a kiss,’ or ‘he hurt me but it felt like true love,’ or even romanticising grooming and paedophilia with her songs ‘Lolita’ or ‘Carmen’ – which evidently sends the wrong message to her target audience: impressionable teenage girls. Besides the terrible book/ film, Hoover just isn’t a good author. Another one of her books, ‘Ugly Love’ similarly has gone viral for the infamous quote, ‘We both laugh at our [infant]son’s big balls.’ To be frank, that’s an incredibly weird thing to write, edit, and ultimately get published.
While Hoover is being criticised for her mediocre writing and plotlines, a vast majority of people are in love with her books. A terrifying video came up on my TikTok feed the other day comparing Hoover to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, saying that she is the modern equivalent to him. Unequivocally, Hoover is not the modern equivalent to Dostoyevsky, whose books are admittedly hard to get through sometimes but posed major philosophical questions to the reader; not how the emotionally unavailable love interest wiping cowpat sexually aroused the main character (also It Ends With Us).
Furthermore, I’ve noticed an extreme lack of critical thinking skills and ability to critique a book based on conventional metrics (writing, character depth, plot, length, etc) which would be okay if the community was centred more on only recommending books but other aspects of it include reviewing and commentary on the books. But instead of being able to discuss, counterpoint, and analyse, you’re hit with this mentality of ‘I liked it because I did, and you shouldn’t say negative things just because you didn’t like it.’ A book is a piece of media that’s meant to be read and then stripped, critiqued, and analysed from different perspectives. Meanwhile, readers are beginning to ‘stan’ authors like Colleen Hoover, or Penelope Douglas, who wrote the book Credence, about an orphaned 17 year-old moving in with her step-uncle and his two sons, and begins a romantic and sexual relationship with all three of them. These fans have the hive mind mentality that these authors are perfect and cannot be subject to any criticism, which is inherently problematic.
In conclusion, I believe that the social media aspect of BookTok is positive – it builds a community, and gets more people into reading, but the hive mind mentality and putting authors on an untouchable pedestal is genuinely terrible. I think that BookTok needs to open up to better titles which unfairly aren’t as famous – such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Coco Mellors, Pulitzer-Prize winning Beloved by Toni Morrison or even Sylvia Plath – views taken with a pinch of salt.
