From my first forays into Book TikTok, 5 things I’ve learned

One of my New Year’s reading resolutions was to experience and try my best to understand also known as #BookTok on the short video streaming social media platform.

I am here to testify that I have fulfilled this resolution and have lived to tell the tale. I do not understand all of it, but I have learned something.

1. Like all social media, there is a lingua franca, and I do not speak TikTok. I am a native Twitter-er. A text-dependent medium is my thing. Twitter makes sense to me, and the discourse is legible in a way that makes it interesting, though frustrating on occasion. TikTok runs on memes and references and music that are simply not familiar. It is clear to me that I am missing much of what is being communicated in the medium.

2. It’s for young people. We know this about newer forms of social media in general and it’s true of TikTok, penetration starts with younger generations before it spreads to older folks. I’m honestly not sure how far TikTok will spread, age-wise, though. It’s even more fragmentary and intense than other social media mediums.

3. Still, it’s kind of fun. The energy and creativity going into these little videos is impressive. I was particularly taken by the use of stop-motion in a bunch of videos where people cataloged the books they had purchased versus the books they had read in 2021. Videos would show the growing stacks on each side of the screen, one side representing purchased, the other read, often accompanied by a music clip titled or maybe credited to “threeprongs.” I’m not sure. Like I said, I’m not TikTok fluent. I was heartened to see that like every other reader, BookTokkers acquire more books than they read. Some things truly transcend age.

4. Print rules. I know that this is supposed to be the digital generation and they love their screens, but physical books dominate on BookTok. It makes sense, given that a physical book provides a much more satisfying visual on video, but I also was struck by many videos showing hundreds of Post-Its and highlights in a single book. BookTokkers are thoroughly digesting what they’re reading.

5. Colleen Hoover’s books will make you cry. There is an entire subgenre under the #CoHo of TikTok videos of young women filming their emotional reactions to Colleen Hoover’s books. Writing at the Washington Post, Stephanie Merry rounded-up some of the most watched Hoover reaction videos, noting the Hoover fans who find themselves overwhelmed by Hoover’s “harrowing plots,” turning this corner of TikTok into one “smeared with runny mascara and littered with used tissues.”

I had to see what was going on, so I picked up Hoover’s 2016 book, “It Ends With Us” which sold more copies last year, thanks to BookTok, than in the year of its release. I am not the audience for the travails of young Lily, in love with neurosurgeon Ryle, but also with unfinished business with first love Atlas, and a past marred by an abusive father. Even so, there is something about Hoover’s willingness, even eagerness to put her narrator through the wringer that had me muttering, “holy crap,” at one particular turn in the story.

No, I did not cry at the end, because I am wizened, my heart shrunken to a nugget of coal, but I understood the appeal, and how it’s not all that different from what drives my fondness for the books I love.

I will probably not be a regular on BookTok, but I’m glad it’s out there.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”