BookTok encourages reading as an aesthetic and no one is safe from its gaze
On TikTok, everything is in pursuit of an aesthetic, including the books you read.
TikTok is a visual platform that tends to algorithmically sort its users into interests, identities, and smaller and smaller niches. On BookTok, those niches are turning into aesthetics where books become accessories. The most prominent literary aesthetic, achieved by reading the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sylvia Plath, is that of the disaffected cool, sad girl.
BookTok is a competitive space that gets a ton of views — the hashtag currently has 132.8 billion views and counting. To talk books, creators need to adapt to the platform's language of aesthetics and archetypes. Photos of passages from books don't perform well. (This isn't Tumblr.) On BookTok, the look of a book, the person reading it, and the presentation of it is important. The song accompanying the video and snappy categorization of it are almost as significant as the title.
The impact of BookTok is seen in other bookish spaces on the internet, like Bookstagram. "There are all of these aesthetic codes that you get from reading these books that are a shorthand for who you are because of this rapidly spreading information about what these books apparently represent about the life of a reader," explains the young female admin of @literary_thicction, an Instagram literary fiction meme account, to Mashable.
The other BookTok archetypes include, but are not limited to, the dark academia reader — The Secret History by Donna Tartt is their bible — the smut enthusiasts, and the distinct categories of Emily Henry, Colleen Hoover, and Taylor Jenkins Reid stans.
These reader archetypes allow those fluent in BookTok to quickly pass judgment on others' reading choices, whether that be the books they post about or those they read in public. All books are fair game.
From this view of reading, BookTok's own panopticontent grew. Accounts devoted to publicizing what people read in various cities accumulate likes. TikTokkers zoom in on the covers of oblivious strangers' books and post clips for hundreds of thousands of people to see. These videos are akin to accounts documenting people's street style or "what are you listening to" videos, but unlike clothing and music, reading is a solitary activity made extremely public by TikTok.
Erin Hunziker, a 28-year-old digital marketing content creator, started posting "what people are reading in NYC" videos on her BookTok account last summer. While Hunziker tries to keep the people in her videos as private as possible, she thinks people deliberately choose the books they read in public, an attitude that justifies subjecting any unwitting commuter to TikTok's insatiable judgement. "Lots of people read on their phones or Kindles on the train, and those people are reading just for the sake of reading. But the people that are reading a physical book with a cover on it, they're making a choice to read that one in public," Hunziker tells Mashable.
The gaze of BookTok doesn't limit its judgement to the choice of book, but also how well that reader performs the archetype their choice assigns to them. "There's a sense of you being able to take that book on the subway and everybody knowing that you're kind of messy, but you're cool," says @literary_thicction in reference to the cool/sad girl canon.
But the people that are reading a physical book with a cover on it, they're making a choice to read that one in public.
Much of TikTok is devoted to trendy aesthetics, from Eloise-core to Barbiecore, and encourages the endless consumption of items in the quest of aesthetics. While BookTok revitalized book sales and encouraged past bookworms to get back into reading, it's also caused reading to fall into the TikTok trap. "The algorithm is highly individualized, but it also pushes people into these like really aestheticized subcultures. It rewards us for finding very consumerist, and materialistic ways of self identifying," Hailey Colborn, a 22-year-old former pageant star who runs @hotliterati on TikTok, tells Mashable. "For example, if I'm reading sad girl literature, and posting about engaging with sad girl lit content, then all of a sudden, I'm going to be pushed towards the Dior lip oil and Miu Miu ballet flats. It's this whole cycle that can literally just start with me liking a TikTok about Sylvia Plath."
Alana Hill, a 26-year-old marketing manager who gained traction on TikTok for her The 1975 analysis videos, uploaded a video encouraging her followers to make TikTok Polyvores, a reference to the defunct social media platform where users created highly curated outfits often with books or television shows to match. She presents both the book she carries with her purse, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and the audiobook she's listening to, I'm With The Band, along with the clothing items that complete her outfit. It's a very explicit example of how books on TikTok are often seen as an extension of your personal style.
"Now when people read something, or listen to certain music, or go to a certain concert, there's an entire aesthetic that's associated with that," Hill explains to Mashable. "I started reading because of fantasy books, but I don't feel like fantasy goes with my aesthetic, even though I can't deny that that's the thing that got me into books and reading. But before reading was ever tied to an aesthetic. I read a lot of fantasy. "
Colborn runs an online book club with around 50 members, and the group is currently reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. As a creator in the book space, Colborn grapples with TikTok being both a place to connect with like-minded readers and somewhere where the writing itself isn't the focal point. "I've definitely taken some steps back because of that pressure to aestheticize reading all the time. I used to just post twice a day. And I would have to find very aesthetic heavy, bitey things to say about every single thing that I was reading," explains Colborn. "I've definitely dialed it back because reading is something that's deeply personal."
Similar to how female musicians like Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers are pigeon-holed into the arbitrary genre of "sad girl music," a subcategory of female literary writers are all lumped together under a single genre. Writers like Moshfegh and Sally Rooney are discussed interchangeably despite being unique in style and intention. And like fans of "sad girl music," the work of these writers also have fan-created playlists. When you finish one of these books you can search the title on Spotify, and fellow readers will have already made corresponding playlists. Typically, these playlists feature the likes of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Mitski. For example, the top My Year of Rest and Relaxation playlist has over 4,300 likes and includes songs by the aforementioned artists as well as other girl staples like Bridgers and Harry Styles.
An aesthetic encompasses all readable aspects of your life, so this internet archetype not only reads Rooney, but listens to the associated artists too.
BookTok's aesthetic approach to reading has also infiltrated physical bookstores hoping to appeal to its audience with internet-oriented displays. One Barnes and Noble display that gained traction on Twitter and Instagram read, "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss," and featured all the cool/sad girl reads. Men who read are largely except from this treatment of reading, just as they are largely exempt from the conversation around chasing aesthetics. (Though, there's a certain archetype constructed around men who read Infinite Jest.)
Kayley Sakamoto, who runs the Instagram @coolgirlsreadingbooks, thinks that women who read tend to labeled as nerdy or innocent. Her account attempts to offer a less constricting view of the reading woman. The 24-year-old writer and barista doesn't limit the books featured on her account to those associated with "cool girl imagery." "It's more important to encourage people to read and enjoy reading than it is to promote only a certain kind of book that should be read by a cool girl," she tells Mashable.
Sakamoto is right. Reading is reading, and it doesn't need to be tied up in all these aesthetic signifiers. But in the meantime, cool girl or not, beware of the BookTok surveillance state.