You may have noticed that in the past few years, reading has become a trend. Obviously, people read less books than they did, say fifty years ago, however it does seem like reading is making a comeback. Part of the reason why stems from social media. There is a corner of social media that is devoted to the topic of books and reading. This side of social media is often called “Booktok.” It is mostly teenage girls and women who are involved in this book craze and into Booktok. With Booktok comes a reading community, full of book recommendations and reviews. Most book sales are driven by social media. Because of this, we see books becoming extremely aesthetic, popular and it has definitely started a reading trend.

As many specific books are becoming popular, many people are reading the same ones. We see people reading on their kindles, listening to audio books and actually reading a real book. Readers are buying a lot of books. No longer do people go to the library and borrow a book, but they must spend twenty dollars on a book that they heard was good. People aren’t just buying one book once in a while either- some people have fifty to one hundred books sitting on their bookshelves waiting to be read. Books aren’t cheap either. People will also buy multiple copies of the same book, simply because one has a fancy cover, or sprayed edges. Why do we have book overconsumption?

The books that have been trending are newly written ones, not old classics. Reading is no longer an intellectual activity, done for learning, but it is simply just for pleasure now. The popular books come in genres such as fantasy, romance, ‘romantasy,’ mystery and thrillers. Books like these are either highly emotional and filled with plot twists, or very surface level, with no depth or thought, just cliche. These books are also overflowing with romance. It can be fluffy and superficial, it can be a deep passion, or it can be extremely explicit romance. Most of the romance in these popular books is very unrealistic, and some women are saying that men in the real world will never match up to the men they read about. Furthermore, there is such a big amount of inappropriateness that is being put into these popular books. In fact, many books are popular just because they are full of explicit and even pornagraphic material, and people want to read these books. Not only are these books extremely not good for someone to read, but I would personally love to see a book become popular for something other than an explicit chapter.

These new books that are popular are usually written pretty poorly as well. The writing styles of these authors are not why the books are popular. Books nowadays are tailored exactly to specific audiences; in this case, the Booktok crowd. Writers have no artistic courage and they aren’t taking any risks. Almost all of the popular books I’ve read are basically the same, if not actually plagiarized.

It is good that reading is becoming a popular pastime as it once was. Although the books that are being read aren’t really the best, it is a start, and that is what matters. Not all of the books written in the past few years are bad, some are actually quite well written with a great and captivating storyline. You must be careful what you read however, because many books are bad influences. Happy reading!