Booktok

the vibes are fetching

I’m smitten by booktok, the corner of Tiktok where people talk about the books they’ve read recently, the books they plan to read, the books they think are overhyped elsewhere on booktok, their reading challenges—basically the same sort of things other communities of readers do— on Twitter, which is my bookish social media—or at the library, or the bar after grad school classes are over, etc. But booktok differs from all these other reading communities in ways that make me love it more than them, at least here in May 2022.

I am by no means a booktok expert, and my warm, fuzzy feeling about that community might just be its newness. I signed up for the first time when Aaron Foley launched a tiktok in advance of his forthcoming novel, and then I just started following people he followed, or followed him, or using the “discover” feature, or searched “booktok” or did whatever blind silly things we do when we first use any social media. With my unsophisticated methods, I found a fertile pa…