Is this subculture of the internet resuscitating a ‘dying’ hobby?

By Liana Yadav

This time last year, I decided that 2024 would be my year of reading. I’m not one for New Year resolutions, largely because I never stick to them, but I needed to find a reason to get out of a massive reading slump that has haunted me since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Gen Z gets a lot of flack for being severely internet-obsessed. We’re assumed to have never known a time before smartphones and social media,  but that’s not necessarily true. If you’re in your later years of university, you probably remember a time when you didn’t have unrestricted access to a phone, your hobbies didn’t revolve around a device and advertisements interrupted your favourite TV shows. For many of us, that hobby was reading.

My favourite childhood memory is coming home from school, hurriedly eating lunch and immediately settling into my couch spending hours poring over Malory Towers by Enid Blyton on a sunny afternoon.

This was the time when reading was a distraction from the outside world. It didn’t feel like wading through quicksand trying to finish a page before addressing the notification on my phone and then spending two more hours on TikTok. 

What came naturally to me and was an endless source of excitement, now seemed an obsolete practice I only thought about in fleeting moments of sorrow about a time lost. Reading is what made me fall in love with words and eventually with writing. It exercised my mind’s muscles, made me more imaginative, opened my mind to new perspectives and led me through worlds and stories of characters who over time became small parts of the person I was growing up to become. 

When the pandemic came around, I had already started to feel distanced from reading. X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram took precedence and instant reading gratification could be found on Wattpad. By the summer of 2020, I was so overwhelmed about the future that the only solace I found was through doomscrolling. Reading wasn’t even a hobby that I thought I would get back to at a later date; it just wasn’t on my mind. But, it had always been such an innate part of my identity that I didn’t know how losing it would affect me. 

It wasn’t until three years after the pandemic that the effect started to materialize. Now a university student facing an attention-span crisis, I realize that my attention is a commodity in a marketplace I do not have any control over. It can only be preserved if it is returned to its rightful place, in things I enjoy doing for myself. And one of those things is reading books. But I knew going back to reading wasn’t going to be easy, doing what’s good for you never is.

What do I even read?

Having access to endless sources of entertainment causes a crippling sense of indecisiveness. It’s so much easier to watch what everyone is raving about on the internet than to actually read what everyone is raving about on the internet because they are usually not doing the latter. Unless you’re on a very specific part of the internet (i.e.) BookTok. In the past, I had found it a personal disgrace to have to turn to them. But this time, I had a realization. I forced myself to reckon with what had not been working for me before in rebuilding the habit of reading. 

The hindrance I had been facing was not just a crisis in concentration, but also a closely-held belief that I was better than other readers — a “pick-me” reader, if you will. I needed to get out of my own head and accept that reading is done for joy, not to prove a point. To put my foot back into this world, I needed to feel like there was a community surrounding what I was consuming I could go on the internet and read succinct, digestible comments about the character I couldn’t stop thinking about. I wanted to not think about what to read next, concerned that it would break the thin ledge my attention was dangerously balancing on. I wanted a directory of a curated book selection from others who suffer from the same affliction. 

Turns out, BookTok was where all my answers lay. 

BookTok = capitalism?

The books popularized on BookTok have very real, heavy, tangible numbers attached to them. Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid sold one million copies worldwide. It was adapted into a television series by Amazon Prime, a company run unethically by the world’s second richest man, which starred Elvis Presley’s granddaughter in the titular role. This book has money written all over it in big capital letters. Daisy Jones & the Six and others that rank in the BookTok lists quickly became the Taylor Swift of the book industry. They’re works of artists whose craft seemingly originated from passion. But when the craft becomes so intrinsically tied to the billion dollars it makes them while the world plummets deeper into an income divide larger than ever seen in history, something about divulging in that craft just doesn’t sit… right.

And so, BookTok becomes a direct beneficiary of capitalism. It makes reading an “aesthetic” — a private activity becomes a performance that is only accepted if it looks a certain way.

Author Melissa Blair explains that BookTok propelled her successful writing career as a debut author. “BookTok is not a publicity app,” she writes, “It’s a community app.” 

Blair’s success wasn’t a random stroke of luck as one of the select few authors picked ambiguously by creators who run BookTok, it was an intentional way of sharing a message that she was passionate about. 

Blair’s romantic fantasy novel series The Halfling Saga was born out of her love for the genre which inspired an idea to create a story surrounding Indigenous characters. Her BookTok success took off when she self-published her book and distributed it anonymously among creators encouraging them to solve a five-clue mystery about the author by reading the book. This set off a storm amongst the community, as Blair’s identity was unveiled along with her shiny writing career and a book series. 

What Blair did, what many authors on BookTok do, is use her passion to connect with readers. Even if this meant having to take a risky marketing approach, the story was loved by readers because they felt seen by it. When Colleen Hoover first wrote It Ends with Us, it grabbed the attention of many because of its distressing, yet familiar themes, particularly of those who related to the protagonist. It created a global community amongst domestic abuse survivors in a way books didn’t have the power to do before. It cannot be denied, however, that Hoover remains controversial and her intentions have been questioned by many abuse survivors. 

But the effect of our dwindling attention spans also cannot be denied. Yes, BookTok is a strange way to try and save the publishing industry. Yet, the only way to keep physical media alive is to engage in conversations and discussions about it through digital media. Movies are watched so they can be talked about online. Music is experienced through the back of camera lenses in concerts. Magazines can be accessed virtually but their physical copies have made an aesthetic resurgence. 

What I am trying to say is that books on their own are not enough to sustain themselves. We need online communities, we need comment sections, and we need the controversy and drama that keeps anything alive and profitable. The reward we get for it? Freely accessible libraries, the smell of a new book’s pages and book tote bags being cool to wear. 

If I were to be able to read consistently this year and meet my resolution, I had to turn to BookTok. And I had to do it with love and acceptance. One quick scroll told me what I wanted to read first.

The books I found and loved through BookTok

This year started with Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a story that follows a Hollywood-esque theatric, sultry world. Reid’s characters feel very real — glamorous but messy, lucky but heartbroken, beautiful but lonely. They’re both unreachable, yet tied so closely to our intrinsic inner world. In contrast, Sally Rooney’s characters are subtle. They live in a detailed world of thoughts and emotions. I loved Beautiful World, Where Are You, especially the way the alternative chapters were written as an email exchange between the two titular female characters. Their thoughts that come out in wordy sentences and subtle inferences through indirect metaphors felt like peering into someone’s journal.

Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman is the story of a house on a farm in Cape Cod and the people who come together because of it. I decided to read this book after a BookToker recommended it based on “The Last Great American Dynasty,” my favourite song from Taylor Swift’s album Folklore. Another great read was The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, which a BookToker compared to my favorite period drama The Gilded Age.

I also read Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay and The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, both a collection of feminist essays and stories through the perspectives of women who have lived very unique yet familiar lives. 

A favourite read this year was The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys by Dao Strom. I found this book in the popular literature — basically BookTok — section of the university library. It tells the story of four Vietnamese women and their experiences going from girlhood to womanhood to marriage and then motherhood. Throughout the story, the women deal with the challenges of romance and relationships as they befriend, marry, and live amongst American men. Each perspective was raw and authentic, yet solid and empowered. I love reading works that take me inside characters’ minds, letting me understand them for myself. I also loved On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong written as a letter to his mother. Every page was as hard-hitting as it was heartwarming.

After finishing my last book of 2024, I happily patted myself on the back for the decision I made a year prior. I read authors and covers I usually never would have picked out because of BookTok, genres I gave a chance because of a gleaming recommendation by my favourite creator. Sometimes, I like to sit back and watch as the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings claim their place in the favourite reads pile of younger BookTokers. They may have taken a different route than mine, but we all reached the same destination of loving books for what’s in them and where they take us.