Yesterday, as I was wasting a few quiet moments at work, I was going through Twitter — rarely a good idea, despite all the lovely friends and fanworks I have there — and came across this article by Jess Bacon, about the juggernaut that is BookTok and how it may, in fact, be ruining reading.

It’s a solid article, but the central question of “Is BookTok sucking the joy out of reading?” should really be rhetorical at this point. Full disclosure: I do have a TikTok account, where I follow accounts that talk about shearing sheep or how to fold t-shirts for more room in your drawers, and yes, a few book vloggers, but I limit my exposure because of the hectic, feverish energy I feel boiling off the site at all times. Vine, while possessing a lot of the same frenzied go-go-go, never felt quite so invasive, at least for me.

But, when I first heard about BookTok, I thought it’d be fun. Lord help me, I thought about taking part. The core of my personality is “woman who reads anything she can get her hands on”, and has been since I was a baby and my parents bragged about how I never held a book upside down, not once, so talking about books with a big community sounded right up my alley.

As Bacon’s article demonstrates, however, BookTok isn’t primarily interested in talking about books, unless it’s to brag about how they’re reading the right books, by whatever metric has gone the most viral. There’s a lot of good commentary, buried deep within the algorithm, about boosting marginalized voices, about hyping indigenous and #ownvoices writers, about diversifying and decolonizing your library, but meaningful dialogue around those topics tends to get buried by the avalanche of people showing off Instagram-perfect libraries and well-tabbed Colleen Hoover novels.

Okay, maybe that last sentence was a bit snide, and I have seen BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers getting their due thanks to the TikTok wave. But Booktok, by and large, seems more concerned about how much you read, and if you’re reading the right books, rather than exploring organically, or reading for pleasure, or educating yourself. I want to ask all of these BookTokers spouting advice about how to read faster (always faster, and only sometimes deeper or more critically) what they remember about the two hundred books they read this year. One BookToker says to “eliminate your inner monologue”, in a video linked in Bacon’s article, but…that isn’t just a monologue. It’s you, engaging with the work you’re reading, allowing yourself to be in conversation with it as each page goes by.

It strikes me that this is just a newly-glorified kind of consumerism; for so many people, it’s about stacking their shelves and their Goodreads lists with books that they’re going to plow through without fully engaging, because reading is now a competition. You have to read the right things, the best things, as many things as you can, all while trying to keep up with the next person on your FYP. And of course publishing loves it, because now they can foist off advertising onto the authors (and woe betide those that aren’t adored by the BookTok hashtag or the algorithm) and the readers. The executive level makes more money, the artists do more work.

Speed-reading does have its uses, and if people genuinely like challenging themselves to see how many books they can read, I think that’s fantastic. A competition with yourself can be a fun adventure, a way to keep reading fresh and to help you discover new, unexpected ideas and experiences. But reading just to hit triple-digits, or to beat someone else (and let’s not get into how turning reading into a competition can get really ableist, really fast) takes away the joy of it, the connection between author and reader, which is at its heart a covenant: our time and attention for their talent and imagination.

It hurts my heart to watch something I love be turned into something focused only on consumption, and not community or escape. To each their own, sure, but so much is being lost in this mad rush for more, more, more.