Are Books Recommended By TikTok Actually Any Good? I Decided To Find Out

The random video app has gained popularity and interest through its newest subcategory of content, and both authors and publishing houses are raking in the profits. While you’re more than likely to find a juicy drama or a raunchy romance recommended to you, you might be curious about the most popular picks on the site. Are the books recommended by TikTok actually any good? I had to find out.

How BookTok Is Disrupting the Industry

The publishing industry as a whole is like the lofty ivory tower of businesses. It’s hard to break into and hard to disrupt, but TikTok, with its army of “BookTokers,” and YouTube (BookTube, etc.) has done just that.

There are not thousands, not millions, but billions of videos under the tag #booktok on TikTok, and many users find that their FYPs, or “for you page” (random videos generated by TikTok’s algorithm to see what catches someone’s interest), are inundated with book recommendations. These recommendations, which heavily feature young adult novels, spread like wildfire thanks to the algorithm, but more than that, they’re affecting change within the industry.

Colleen Hoover’s novel It Starts With Us was published in 2016. It centers around a love triangle and an abusive relationship, and Hoover admits that it’s heavily based on her own parents’ relationship. In 2021, thanks to BookTok, the book sold millions of copies. Novels like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis received similar treatments. What’s perhaps most intriguing about this genre of TikToks is that books that were published years ago, like Hoover’s, were suddenly making their way to the New York Times Bestseller’s List, all thanks to BookTok. From the end of 2020 to the middle of 2021, book sales climbed to an almost 20-year high.

TikTok has skyrocketed books published years ago onto the New York Times Bestseller’s List.

I Decided To Find Out

I’ve been reading obsessively for as far back as I can remember. College killed my passion for reading as a pastime though, and I’ve only recently gotten back into it. Following the birth of my daughter, I’ve had a lot of late nights and breastfeeding sessions with nothing to do (you can only watch Law and Order so many times), and I’ve read more in the past few months than I have in the past few years.

I’ve read five TikTok recommended novels by this point, and we’ll go through the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good: Only one of these novels made the cut for me, or what I’d rate as a five out of five stars. Bunny by Mona Awad is a dark academia-themed thrill that is a wild ride from start to finish. It follows a young writing student at a prestigious university who gets involved with a group of girls, and I’ll leave it at that. It’s gripping but also disturbing, in the best way. It brings surprise after surprise that you never see coming, with a satisfying ending, and I was still thinking about it long after I finished it. Stylistically, it’s expertly written and beautifully paced, which is why it gets a gold star from me.

Then, the bad. I read Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue because it was gifted to me without knowing anything about it, but it’s an enemies-to-lovers plot following the son of the President of the United States and a royal prince from across the pond. While it was fairly well-written, it was also raunchy and politically motivated in an unredeeming way. I also read My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, a #MeToo-driven account of a girl who is groomed by her English teacher. My Dark Vanessa is one of the most popular recommendations on TikTok, but it didn’t engage me as much as I wanted. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney followed a similar tone, and I was disappointed in this one because I’ve enjoyed Rooney’s other two novels. As with all of these novels, there was a politically ideological message to be made first and foremost. Themes like abuse of power, acceptance of sexual identity, and capitalism dominated these novels. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, since every book or novel has a message it’s trying to deliver to its readers, those messages felt poorly executed, heavy-handed, moralistic, and so unwieldy that they distracted from the other valuable aspects of the book.

On to the ugly. It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover has TikTok by the throat at the moment, and unfortunately the plot, characters, and prose are thoroughly unremarkable. It’s got a fair amount of drama and suspense, which I believe is the appeal, but that’s about it. If you convert it to a caloric medium, it’s about as nourishing as a bag of hot Cheetos – entertaining in the moment, but it might leave you with a stomach ache.

Books that find the most popularity on BookTok follow a similar vein. Most of them are categorized as fantasy or young adult fiction, and feature suspense, drama, or romance, or other shocking topics like sexual abuse and suicide. In this subjective reader’s opinion, I can see why they’re popular, but I wouldn’t say they’re the epitome of excellent reading.

The Upsides (and Downsides)

Any trend that motivates people to get interested in and excited about reading is a win in my book. But this trend isn’t without its problems.

Of the countless TikToks and BookTube videos that I’ve sifted through, there seems to be an overwhelming adherence to political correctness. On the one hand, this means that books written by authors or who have characters that are more diverse are more heavily featured. While there isn’t anything problematic with that in theory – especially since everyone should read whatever or whomever they want – it’s triggered a nasty side effect too often found in woke culture. 

The marriage of progressive ideals and PC overtones on social media has made classical literature obsolete.

BookTok is most popular with younger generations, and that marriage of progressive ideals and the PC overtones which govern social media has now made classical literature essentially obsolete. Books which feature masculine tones or are written by white writers have no place in this renewed interest in literature. There’s also an extreme abhorrence on the part of these TikTokers with regard to themes that are problematic. Books that feature themes like racism, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny, to name just a few, or even worse, were written in the racially turbulent times of the latter 20th century, should not just be avoided altogether but reviled and condemned. 

Take books like To Kill a Mockingbird, which features themes like the innocence of youth, shared humanity, racial prejudice, justice, and truth. The novel was written by a white writer and includes the offensive language of the 1930s. But when today’s critics confront this novel, they don’t gauge it by the standards of prose, content, and style, or even the book’s message, but by the guidelines which determine what’s acceptable or “good” media in today’s age. We judge the past by today’s standards, and it’s for that reason alone that many believe this classic novel shouldn’t be taught in schools or even read today.

Closing Thoughts

Reading in some ways is like following a diet. Every so often you need a filling salad, and every so often you might need a bag of hot Cheetos. TikTok can help with both, but whatever novel appeals to you, more and more people are having their eyes opened to the joy and community that only reading a good book can bring. And that’s something to celebrate.

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