BookTube and BookTok's culture is ruining people's reading experience.
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the pressure among many to fill up the long stretches of boredom with whatever people could find was of no surprise. Everyone was forced to become homebodies: staying at home, minimizing human interaction, and filling up most of one’s leisure in solitude. Many have taken advantage of this extra time by catching up on reading and delivering more books to their homes than ever before,
BookTok
Furthermore, as TikTok grew in popularity during the pandemic, an influx of trends came in — one of them being BookTok, or short books reviews posted on TikTok. I find this really cool, honestly; people are coming together on a social media platform and are sharing their perspectives on a novel they hated, a classic they went crazy over, an autobiography that apparently changed their lives.
Why I find this troubling
Nonetheless, I think that this trend has become more about promoting popular books that are just plain out boring. Yes, there’s a — sometimes intriguing — plot with characters we can root for. But there isn’t really anything to discuss about such stories afterwards. You just move on to the next trendy book.
When Colleen Hoover’s novel “It Ends With Us” blew up on TikTok, I can’t deny that I was pressured to buy the book. There were seemingly endless reviews raving about the main characters Lily, Ryle and Atlas, and I couldn’t help but read it.
But I finished the book in two nights and found the writing style a little shallow — “these reads are so fast-paced because Hoover’s writing is elementary. Hoover knows that she attracts a younger audience and writes targeted towards them.” I didn’t really want to think about it afterwards — it honestly felt like a waste of time. I kind of just forgot about it all.
People tend to read books telling the stories of characters that they resonate with. This of course isn’t always the case, but many readers want to find an internal connection with the protagonist’s values. However, I highly doubt that everyone who picked up “It Ends With Us” could relate to a story that brushed on domestic abuse. I’m not saying stories like these shouldn’t exist — I understand why people spent time analyzing Lily’s struggle between love and abuse — but it seems as if many people who have become readers nowadays are limited to this one genre. Also, Hoover’s targets a younger audience of preteens and teenagers. Why should they fall in love with reading from a novel with a juvenile writing style discussing topics of physical abuse?
BookTube
There has also been a growth in content creators sharing the 100+ books they read throughout the year. I’m not going to say I don’t watch them. But — disregarding the content creators that are English, Philosophy or creative writing majors, just to name a few — the books that these influencers read and share are just boring. Some believe that this overconsumption of book buying is similar to fast fashion hauls of influencers: “the idea of a book haul immediately makes people uneasy because it represents books, not only as a consumer product, but a product that is low quality and even disposable like the fast fashion clothes in those videos.” If I hear another YouTuber rave about “Atomic Habits” or “Verity,” I might scream. I want to watch a BookTube video giving me book recommendations I have never heard of. Right that’s the whole point — to share your current reads and possibly discover a new one?
In spite of this, many of these YouTubers I’m referring to produce content for a living, so I am not really criticizing them. But it’s just unrealistic to the rest of us. Why is there a pressure to read as many books as humanly possible in a short span of time? Why can't you just read for the sake of reading, and then share that content online?
Reading a book shouldn’t feel like a disposable task. It’s perfectly acceptable to ponder over it, reread chapters that you can’t help but remember and annotate within the margins. There isn’t really a “right” way to read for pleasure. But I would rather spend a few weeks reading a novel, considering its themes and tropes, connecting a scene with a movie I just watched and watching a video essay about someone else’s opinion on the topic.
Also, right the whole point of reading is to ‘escape’ from your current reality? How many times have you heard of readers wanting to quite literally insert themselves into the fantasy world of their favorite novel? If you end up only reading books that you can finish in a week or less, you wouldn’t be able to ‘live’ in said world for a while. At this point, why did you want to read the book in the first place? To break your record of 150 books from the previous year? It defeats the whole purpose of this escapist reality. You don’t allow yourself to think about the story, how it might relate to you or how you would possibly approach writing your own story one day.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that you aren’t allowed to read what you want. Every now and then I read a book that takes me a week or less to finish. I do, however, believe we are doing a disservice to ourselves if we are not willing to expose ourselves to a variety of genres beyond love fantasies written at the elementary level and self-help books. Read an autobiography, some poetry, an essay, or a fictional story that is contextually dissimilar to the novels you’ve previously read. Read a classic or any novel published preceding the 21st, or even 20th, century.
There shouldn’t be this pressure to read as much as possible because it is quite literally impossible to read everything. If reading is meant to take you to an alternate reality you can’t find anywhere else, why limit yourself to the same story, the same plot twists, the same relationships? Change it up a bit: a money heist thriller here, a personal vendetta there, a memoir from someone you’ve never heard of, an article about a niche topic you find fascinating. Don’t make reading a race, make it fun.
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