I hate TikTok, I hate the communities it flourishes, I hate its algorithmic thinking, I hate what it does to people. I say this as a victim of its eternal consumption, an addict of my own making. I had a random TikTok about the 1975 blow up back in December and I got a comment on it two weeks ago still telling me I was wrong for saying Notes on a Conditional Form is their worst album by a considerable distance. TikTok is the subject of Congressional debate this month, as the American government is worried that a foreign nation is collecting data on Americans that they somehow don’t already have. I haven’t really kept up with this hearing because to me it’s a lose-lose situation, but something that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said during the hearing found its way to me thanks to my For You page. Chew directly referenced BookTok as a positive TikTok experience, saying people have told him they are reading more after being on BookTok. And let me just tell you, if I hate TikTok, I loathe BookTok.

BookTok is a cesspool of self-declared tastemakers who don’t bother to put a face or a voice to their opinions but are happy to tell you ‘books I couldn’t put down’ or ‘books that made me blush’ or ‘spicy books.’ Much like AO3 as I mentioned in a previous article, BookTok is, at least on the surface, a cul-de-sac of white women regurgitating the same type of story over and over again. They all speak in a particular way that feels like a kindred spirit of Male YouTuber Voice (“What’s up guys, it’s [insert name] here!”). Several creators have business emails, playlists on their channels with recommendations and author advice, and the like. Some get their biggest videos off of videos with no talking at all, setting their video to a song popular on the platform while onscreen text and the occasional text to speech module substituting for a persona. BookTok reeks of a lack of individuality, with each creator mimicking the same three or four types of videos to game the algorithm. The closest anyone gets to disclosing personal taste is admitting that BookTok made them buy a book that they didn’t like very much. Book recommendations come in the form of elevator pitch plot synopses that do little to tell the audience about the book’s style or themes, or of the author’s actual feelings about them beyond the category it has been given for the purpose of the video. Very few creators ever discuss books outside of the modern publishing world. This has created an interesting marketing feedback loop where bookstores and publishing companies embrace the trends of BookTok. Go to your local Barnes and Noble and you’ll find at least one display of trending titles. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is a BookTok canon of must reads, but I have seen numerous mentions of Sarah J. Maas and Colleen Hoover, who coincidentally also have their own displays at my local Barnes and Noble. Not that I blame bookstores for adapting, a market is a market and BookTok is a very vocal market, and one with the best kind of demand: the same thing over and over again.

Back to that Congressional hearing for a second, naturally a clip of Chew mentioning BookTok as a benefit of the platform made its way to the platform. A few different videos of the clip exist with hundreds of comments of the community patting itself on the back. BookTok is Good because we’re Reading, everyone! Inevitably some of my dissatisfaction with all of this has to do with personal taste, I’m much more interested in the classics and the modern fringe; my last trip to a bookstore I walked out with Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, one of which I’ll be starting after I finish the new Cormac McCarthy novels. The books trending on BookTok largely don’t interest me and the way they are talked about doesn’t do much service to them for someone who exists outside this petri dish of milquetoast romance and/or fantasy. You’ll be hard pressed to find a popular BookTok creator pushing science fiction (save for stealth romance title This Is How You Lose the Time War), horror, or nonfiction in general. There’s a gamification to it all. You can’t talk about one book unless you have four others that fit under some nebulous category. Grinding for number of titles read often leads to people flying through relatively simple prose and having a bigger focus on plot and a book’s qualifiers (diversity points in the most literal sense) than prose or themes. It prioritizes consumption quantity over consumption quality, the act of reading becoming more important to the creator than what is actually being read. But just as only watching post-1990 American films doesn’t make you a cinephile, only reading the latest in a couple of desired genres doesn’t make you a bibliophile.

We all live in our own internet bubbles. I have one, you have one, we have space in our bubbles that intersect by virtue of you reading this. A lot of people have bubbles that reinforce comfort, the internet becoming a safe haven for finding the hundredth variation of a thing you know you already like that you won’t have to think too much about. The BookTok bubble is a bad one, one that shows you a pool and calls it deep when there are oceans out there to swim through. It’s a suburb calling itself a real community, where the homeowners’ association ran out the weirdos long ago. I’m lucky enough to cultivate a circle for myself that exists more on the fringes, but I can’t imagine young readers are being fed well by this content mill. We owe it to ourselves to push beyond what the average person is reading, and BookTok is not getting us there.

Just read more books. Please. I’m begging you.