‘BookTok’ has lost the plot

Young people – predominantly women – have started using video-sharing platform TikTok to make reading ‘cool’ again. Given that TikTok is widely held responsible for nuking Generation Z’s attention span, injecting 10-second snippets of content slop directly into their eyeballs, any attempt to kindle a love of books must surely be a good thing.

The trouble is, the BookTok influencers don’t seem up to the task of, well, reading. Last month, a video perfectly demonstrating this point made the rounds on social media. It features a TikToker called ‘Yannareads’ reviewing a young-adult fantasy novel called Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Yana, as her screen name would suggest, dedicates almost all of her online content to chronicling the books she reads and reviewing them for her 280,000 followers.

Yana didn’t exactly love Six of Crows. Despite only reaching page 34, she felt compelled to ‘talk shit for a second’ while wildly waving a paperback copy around. ‘First of all’, she says in the video, ‘the writing is so tiny. And why are the pages filled with so many words?’ Is she seeing a book for the first time? Books do, quite famously, tend to be filled with words.

She then complains that the plot, which centres on a criminal gang in an Amsterdam-inspired fantasy world, is far too complicated for her to understand. ‘This book is so fucking difficult for my brain to follow’, she says. ‘All these words? Like, I have no idea what’s going on.’ The words she’s referring to are mostly made-up place names (such as ‘Ketterdam’, the fictional city where the book is set), which is pretty par for the course in any fantasy novel.

She is also bemused that the book contains several maps. You might think that, given her dislike of words, she would be pleased to see some pictures. But the maps pose a problem, too: ‘There’s three different maps that I have to learn… I literally can’t read any of the names.’

I dare say that young Yana, like many other BookTok influencers, doesn’t actually enjoy reading all that much. This might seem unfair. Yes, in a technical sense, she is doing some reading. A lot of it, in fact. One of the things that characterises BookTok is a voracious consumption of books (one or more a week) and having an absurdly large, aesthetically arranged library. But you never really get the sense that any of these TikTokers understand what the words mean, what the characters are doing or what the point of any of it is.

I’ve read Six of Crows, the book Yana is struggling with. It’s less than 500 pages long, not very complicated at all and written for ‘young adults’ – that is, anyone aged between 12 and 18. We’re hardly talking War and Peace here.

One of the hallmarks of BookTok is an obsession with young-adult (YA) fiction, despite the fact that almost all of the big influencers are grown adults. Which is fine, if you’re into that sort of thing. Or if you’re a 14-year-old girl.

Not all BookTokers are into teen fiction, though. Some, like Yana, primarily read erotic romance. Her bio reads: ‘If it’s not smut, I probably won’t read it.’ Again, there’s nothing wrong with reading this sort of content in and of itself. But let’s not pretend that Colleen Hoover’s smutty romance novels have the same literary value as Dickens or Austen.

Why do so many members of Gen Z find it so difficult to read anything more complex than smut and teen fantasy? Perhaps a large part of it is because they struggle to put themselves in someone else’s head – a fundamental part of reading and enjoying fiction. Apparently, even reading books written in the third person is a struggle for some youngsters.

You see signs of young people’s inability to step outside of themselves in a growing antipathy to the entire Western literary canon. Young university students often claim that they can’t relate to old, dead white men any more. If an author or character doesn’t share exactly the same sexuality, gender, race or life experiences as them, it feels almost impossible to empathise with their story. Hence why smut (which features largely blank-slate characters for readers to project themselves on to) and YA (which is dominated by woke publishers pandering to Gen Z’s identitarian tastes) are so popular.

Literary agencies are reinforcing Gen Z’s self-obsession and woke prejudices. One agent has specifically called for books ‘written by LGBTQIA+ and / or BIPOC [black, indigenous and other people of colour] authors’. Another agency says that it isn’t interested in representing authors who’ve written ‘a book about an identity that is not yours’. ‘We are not interested in stories about white able-bodied WW2 evacuees but would welcome that story from a disabled, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC perspective’, it adds.

These kinds of books go down well online, with authors promoting their novels purely on the basis that it’s a ‘lesbian fantasy book with black and Asian romance’. Influencers love to recommend books on the grounds of their ‘lesbian, trans, genderfluid and ace [asexual] representation’. In the real world, though, these books are much less of a hit.

It feels like too many Gen Z readers are generally unwilling to challenge themselves. They don’t want to imagine that they are anyone except the exact person they are right now. They don’t want to have to learn new fantastical words or pick up on the more subtle elements of worldbuilding. They certainly don’t want to read anything that suggests there are shades of grey to morality. They want their fiction, just like their politics, to be black and white and spoon-fed to them by someone else. If this is the future of literature, then count me out.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.