Like it or not, social media has pervaded almost every hobby and niche these days. A prime example of this is BookTok/BookTube/BookStagram… I could go on!
While this is primarily a stationery blog, the integration of social media into what is predominantly an analogue hobby has me torn for quite a few reasons and it’s technically paper… so I decided to write an article about it anyway. I should clarify beforehand that I’m not on any of the mainstream social medias (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) but I do frequent YouTube for music and tutorials. Even without accounts with these socials, though, when trying to find new books I’ve been hit with a barrage of posts from bookfluencers (who also appear to love portmanteaus) recommending the latest YA hits, such as Icebreaker or some other light romance reading, as well as full-blown ‘romantasy’ series.
This fundamentally bothers me on quite a few levels. First off, I like classic books anyway, think Franz Kafka and the traditional Russian novelists. I do read newer novels too, and I’ve found some gems, but I’ve grown up and fed off a lot more classic books than contemporary ones on the whole and have only begun reading a lot more newer books in the past two years. This means that to begin with, I’m not very used to the often highly conversational, informal tone of many YA novels, and they can come off as highly ‘teenager-ish’ to me. I’m 19. This should not bother me. The fact remains that it does. I have friends a few years younger than me who do not speak this way in real life, and have a knowledge of, you know, language. The protagonists of many of these over-hyped BookTok books are supposed to be a few years older than me, and they have the vocabularic range and emotional intelligence of a thirteen-year-old who’s been raised on reality shows. I can’t deal with that. Life’s too short to rot my brain that way.
(Watches a YouTube short of a revolutionary new device to toast bread more efficiently)
Anyway.
It’s not just this that gets me, it’s also the culture behind the whole thing and the ethics of it all. Just one issue is that the authors of these books are publishing content that sometimes really shouldn’t be marketed as YA at all. Many YA romantasy books involve highly explicit content and would be likely to be better off marketed as 18+, especially as many include highly toxic and damaging relationships. I’m not saying that shouldn’t be used as a plot device at all, but perhaps not when your audience is going to include a lot of young people. It runs the risk of normalising these kinds of relationships in real life – when a fourteen year old is still trying to find out who they are in life, they probably don’t need this kind of content rammed down their throat by social media.
That’s not to say there can’t be positives though. I recently had a conversation with a friend who’s a writer himself, and he took a typically reasonable approach to the matter and told me that surely anything which encourages people to read is a good thing. Surprisingly I hadn’t really thought about this before – I wonder how many people, by dint of being ‘influenced’, actually discovered the joy of reading and now regularly read in their spare time as a result? If BookTok and its familiars have achieved nothing else, that is quite the accomplishment. If social media can prise people, especially young adults like myself, off their phones and shove them headfirst into a book instead, I’m all for it. I suppose my real gripe, then, is the toxicity of some of the content and the books themselves.
But again, it’s not all doom and gloom in the book department. While many BookTok titles are explicit just for laughs, there are occasions where the book also has a very solid plotline and good world-building. Or you can come across books that you can’t seem to put down because the story’s too good – I was slightly shocked that I enjoyed Daisy and the Six so much, as I’d previously assumed it was hopelessly over-hyped. It has its flaws, but it made for a very good light read that led me to read Carrie Soto is Back. Yet again I barrelled through the whole thing in a few hours, and it managed to give me a newfound appreciation for tennis at the same time.
There are many other things both good and bad that I could discuss here, but these points are the main reasons why I find myself facing a dilemma surrounding BookTok culture. Of course, this article reflects my own personal opinions and thoughts and is not authoritative – for me as much as I want to hate BookTok, there are just a few too many positives for me to write it all off. What do you think about the role of social media in reading?
