BookTok: Do I like hearing about books more than reading them?

One day, I want to read War and Peace. Not so I can gloat that I read a notoriously hard-to-read book, but because I genuinely want to. Every time I go to the bookstore, I see it sitting up there with its dauntingly massive size, its heavy word count barely being held up by the shelf, and I wonder what it would be like to experience. I’ve seen enough videos of people talking about it to know it’d be up my alley. But still, it sits there. It stares down and laughs at me, calling me names.

If only I had the belief that I could read the book without it taking me years. However, this seems impossible, as currently so much of my free time is being consumed by my phone. Ironically, a lot of that phone time (that could instead be used to read more books) is spent watching videos of people talking about books. There are so many of these bite-sized clips all over social media, the most notorious platform for this being TikTok.

BookTok is a craze an article I skimmed said started in about 2019. Other platforms have since followed suit. There’s also ‘BookTube’, ‘Bookstagram’ and ‘Book Twitter’ to name a few. However, even on these other platforms BookTok still seems to be the most popular term to describe short videos about books.

My experience with BookTok started around 2022 when, after not having read a book for years, I started watching a lot of videos about fantasy novels. I heard lots about books like The Eye of the World, Mistborn, The Name of the Wind, Best Served Cold or The Fifth Season. They all sounded sick as hell, and I wanted to read them. So, for Christmas that year, I asked for a book I heard was amazing and thought had an awesome title: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson.

I had, however, neglected to research what this book was about or how long it was. It wasn’t until I tore away the gift wrapping I began to get some idea.

The Way of Kings is a 1,200-page, slow-paced epic fantasy war narrative.

It looked ridiculous. It was so thick it could stop a bullet. It looked like someone had taken a picture of a regular book and widened it on photoshop. To top it off, the words themselves were comically tiny, like the book was making fun of you for trying to read it. Getting back into books by reading The Way of Kings is like getting back into Kung Fu by fighting seven Jackie Chans.

I’d like to say I tackled it well, but I didn’t at all. It took me almost two years to finish.

Even though I wasted so much time on my phone instead of reading, it did prove to be a fantastic novel. During the last third, I was totally hooked, and instead of doomscrolling before bed each night, my eyes were glued to the book.

When I was done, I read another book. And then another and then another. I got into a groove of reading and I loved it. Every night before going to sleep, I cracked open a novel and entered a new world (not the supermarket). I was happy the reading groove wasn’t going away.

But then I started uni.

My free time quickly began to wither. Reading during the day was no longer something I had time for. I also started to go to bed later, and so reading a couple chapters in bed turned into reading just a couple pages, which then turned into reading just two pages, which turned into just reading a page or a half.

Now, most nights I don’t read at all. I often think: “What’s really the point of reading tonight if I’m hardly going to make any progress?” Instead, if I want to be entertained before I go to sleep, I go on my phone.

And what do I do on my phone instead of reading books? I watch short videos of people talking about reading books.

If an outside observer were to judge what I liked more: reading books or hearing about them, I fear they may say the latter.

But I know this isn’t true. I’ve never wasted the day reading a book. I’ve never felt that a book was a terrible distraction. I’ve never been reading a book and paused to say aloud: “What the hell am doing? I need to stop.” I cannot say the same for the time I spend on my phone.

I think this comes down to the fact that in the battle for our free time books have a major disadvantage: The book has not been designed to be as addictive as possible. A book has no notifications or pop-ups or fun sounds or bright colourful buttons. All a book has is words. Plain and simple.

Still, I’m determined that one day I’ll do the impossible. I’ll put my phone down. I’ll reach up to that high spot on the bookshelf. I’ll bring War and Peace down to my level. I’ll stare it right in the cover and say:

“Get ready. I’m gonna read the absolute shit out of you.”

PHOTO: Cora Pursley, Dupe.