BookTok: The Online Community of Book Lovers

I don’t read as much as I used to, and not nearly as much as I’d like to. School and other obligations take up too much of my time, so I no longer have the time to go to my local library to search for books. So, I’ve begun trying to find book recommendations online. Sites like GoodReads was a goldmine of recommendations, but I found it was very difficult to find what I was looking for, especially since I’m very picky when it comes to romance in books. Right now, my favourite resource for book recommendations is BookTok. BookTok—short for Book TikTok—is an online community on Tiktok dedicated to books and reading.

There are several positive factors that attract people to online book communities like BookTok. For me, the most important thing is being able to find very specific and good book recommendations.

If you filter your algorithm properly, you can get really specific recommendations to the point of choosing books based on different tropes or different subjects you’re interested in. For example, I’ve become interested in queer history and stories. I’ve gotten many suggestions from BookTok, such as Ace by Angela Chen, anon-fiction book, as well as other fictional stories. As it is an online platform, you can also interact with others who have read the same books and form communities around specific books and genres. So far from what I’ve seen, BookTok is also great at recommending books with more diversity, such as books with queer and BIPOC characters, or authors with different backgrounds. I also love the aesthetics and the annotations of BookTok. People put a lot of effort into making their videos and books look pretty, using colour-coded sticky notes to write annotations in their books.

Like any online community, BookTok has its own struggles. If you’re someone like me, who doesn’t like reading romance, you may have difficulty finding good book recommendations as most of BookTok’s most popular books are about romance or romance-heavy books, which often contain “spicy” content. In addition, many of these romance-focused books contain toxic relationships portrayed as “romantic.” The “enemies-to-lovers” trope is often heavily used in a lot of BookTok romance novels, which can be problematic because this trope relies on the pair originally hating each other and hurting each other, then falling in love. This can often result in unhealthy relationships and unbalanced relationship dynamics. My final problem is nitpicky, but BookTok occasionally enforces bad habits such as buying a lot of books and not reading them. I’ve seen videos of people bragging about having shelves of unread books.

Again, it’s a very minor issue, but it is a bit of a waste to buy books and not read them. I usually just read on my Kobo, and don’t buy books unless I really like them and know I’ll read them again.

I’ve read several BookTok books, some good and some bad. I’ve found a couple that I’ve enjoyed, so here are some of my personal BookTok recommendations! 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a romance book, but I actually enjoyed the plot. It follows a lesser-known journalist named Monique Grant, who miraculously obtains an interview with old Hollywood actor Evelyn Hugo. Through Evelyn’s interview, Monique learns the truth behind Evelyn’s rise to stardom, as well as the stories behind Evelyn’s seven husbands, all of whom she outlived. It vocalises the toxicity of celebrity culture and how the media we consume can be manipulated. There are tons of twists and turns, and it is one of the only historical fiction books I’ve ever read. 

Legendborn is one of my favourite, if not my favourite, book series of all time. Legendborn is about 16-year-old Bree Matthew, who attends a residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC Chapel Hill, the university her mother attended before dying in an accident years later. On campus, Bree discovers a secret society with magic that may have a link to her mother’s death. Determined to find the truth, Bree and a couple of allies venture into the society to uncover the truth. I’ve already written two book reviews for the first two books in the trilogy and I have both of the books on my very small bookshelf! It has a lot of casual representation for both the BIPOC and queer community, and addresses systemic injustice, while also being a fun fantasy novel based around the Arthurian legends.

Six of Crows is the story of a heist organised by Kaz Brekker, a ruthless conman. He and his crew of five other skilled individuals have to navigate the brutal world, as well as their own relationships. It’s part of a series called Grishaverse. It’s made up of a trilogy and two duologies. I think TikTok may have hyped this series up too much, but it was overall enjoyable. There’s also a show on Netflix based on the Grishaverse, called Shadow and Bone, named after the first book in the series.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is another one of my favourite books. The story is told from the perspective of Linus Baker, a caseworker for a governmental organisation which manages orphaned kids who are magical beings. He’s assigned to assess a special orphanage of powerful children on the island of Marsyas, run by a man called Arthur Parnassus, who has some secrets of his own. I’m a low fantasy fan, if you couldn’t tell! Low fantasy is when fantasy intrudes into the “normal world,” like Percy Jackson. The opposite of low fantasy is high fantasy, which is where the story happens in a completely different magical world, like Lord of the Rings. This book had great queer representation, the “found family” trope and well-developed characters. The story is based around the 60’s Scoop of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, but it can be viewed as either good representation or bad, depending on your perspective.