The word BookTok is a term any active TikTok or even social media user has stumbled across at least once in the last couple of years. BookTok is a TikTok community in which you’ll find thousands of readers sharing their thoughts and recommendations on popular literary pieces.
This community of book lovers gained amazing popularity during the pandemic when the quarantine was driving millions to kill time by seeking new hobbies. Upon the sudden rise of interest shown in this smaller aspect of social media, many influencers began creating content revolving around “the reader aesthetic”. Soon enough, the enthusiastic body of readers making up the community started shifting. Reading began losing the privilege of being done for the innocent purpose of pleasure. Books were now a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a magical object. If you owned enough books, you were a reader, you were quirky, you were superior. The belief that owning a lot of books or having have read a lot of books made one “know things” spread across the internet like a virus. This has always been the business model of the influencer body, to plant a new superiority standard inside the insecure mind and to profit off of the product necessary for it. Literature was simply one of the more recent victims of this ugly side of media.
Nowadays, the act of reading has been replaced with the act of being a reader, and books have become just another tool for fabricating personalities. Now the “readers” are hungry for hard covers, they’re hungry for special editions, they’re hungry for books that will look beautiful, colorful, aesthetic as they sit and gather up dust on their shelves. They’ll go online and post a video of their new book haul, they’ll say they have a problem and laugh, they’ll show off their bookish personalities. Then they’ll go look for some more books they can add to their collection of unread beauties.
The subject matter of popular BookTok books are also of concern as they’ve begun mirroring the type of content succeeding in the previously mentioned part of social media: easy, digestible, entertaining. With reading becoming a trend, people trying to force themselves into the “reader” phrase have turned towards books that will not require too much thinking or understanding. Adult fiction has been the brightest spot in any bookshop since 2022. Fiction print sales have grown by 1% over the prior year, led by fantasy and romance genres. With this sudden jump and simplification in client’s interests, books started losing unique story lines and messages threaded into their sentences and morphing into basic products of consumerism. A fiction book is no longer about a story but instead the trope it’s built on. Does the male protagonist have a concerning tendency to murder? Will the man and the woman have no choice but to sleep in the same bed even though they’re enemies? Will they become lovers in the end? Of course. That’s what the book was written for. This simplification of fiction plot quality inevitably leads to books losing their artistic authenticity and becoming basic products of consumerism; easily written, read and forgotten.
It is easy to call the critics of this trope-ified literature as just defenders of so called “proper” literature but the issue with trope-ified literature is not the taste, it’s the content. With recently published literature becoming simpler and similar, the number of authors in stores have risen immensely. Hundreds of inexperienced, untalented writers being published over and over again is no good news for the future of literature. Lack of experience and talent in creating any side of consumable media drives the creator to use cheaper attention grabbers like corny romance or sexual content, which is exactly what’s happening to the fiction market. Recently published books often contain a lot of detailed “smut”, or basically, graphic sexual content. With a short 10 minutes spent in BookTok, you will find that rather than the content or quality, most book recommendations are based off of the amount of spicy chapters they contain. Today, most “readers” you see talking about their love for literature are incapable of reading a book that does not contain enough porn.
The porn addiction epidemic bleeding into literature is concerning because when literature is reduced to only it’s spice content, and this kind of literature outsells other genres, it signals a future of literature being an easily consumable form of entertainment rather than an art piece encouraging the exploration of deeper themes. It signals that true literature is closer to dying in the hands of fried dopamine receptors than assumed.
With brainrot similar to this spreading like wildfire across the globe, people can no longer tell what they believe is problematic on the internet is of no importance outside of their phones. Anti-intellectualism has never been as prevalent as it is currently and we as a society are slowly losing the ability to take basic criticism. These new trends in literature may seem simple on the surface but they promote anti-intellectualism, capitalism and consumerism in the worst aspects possible. The simplification of literature is of big threat for future generations if not gotten under control as soon as possible. Arguing saying “Let people enjoy things!” can’t and won’t change what was stated and we as a society need to regain the ability to accept what we enjoy may be flawed. Criticism is necessary because it is a part of how we began to understand both ourselves and the complicated life we’re all a part of.