Behind the algorithm, there are people. And in front of the algorithm, reflecting its tastes and aesthetics, there are more people—readers—who want to read books with people like them, about people like them.
A little over a year ago, I saw what appeared to be an unremarkable BookTok recommendation video, full of the classics of the BookTok canon. I swiped through the slides recommending Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emily Henry, Kristin Hannah, Ali Hazelwood, and at the very end of the stack, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, described as “a classic.” At first glance, the play felt totally out of place in a stack of novels straight out of an airport bookstore. But the strangeness and randomness of Wilde’s inclusion in this carousel made me reconsider the structuring logic of the genre of the BookTok recommendation. BookTok’s recommendations constitute a kind of canon, dominated by an aesthetic that is best defined as, well, mid. But what are the contours of the literary mid-ness of mainstream BookTok and how does this canon and its formation help us to come to understand what the mid signifies?
The canon(s) of mainstream BookTok largely operate in ways that we might expect: book recommendations highlight readability, relatability, and a sense of ‘real’ or ‘compelling’ characters. And like the inclusion of The Importance of Being Earnest, BookTok’s foray into the world of the ‘serious literary canon’ is unmistakably mid, typically male, and very random: we get Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, John Steinbeck’s shortest work (The Pearl), the most unsubtle novel in American letters (The Great Gastby), among other books that smack of leftover copies on your childhood bookshelf from your high school English class’s assigned reading. Take this TikTok, from user Andra V (@perfecttopping_), which bounces from Kristin Hannah to Colleen Hoover to…Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, a book described as follows: “Super old but brilliant book! Gets you to reflect on ‘intelligence’ in our society. My friends and I talked a lot about it.” The supplement of this ‘classic’ literature reads as a way to boost the user’s credibility as a reader or signal something about their ‘seriousness’, but the choice of Flowers for Algernon is unbearably mid. It’s the kind of book that someone who does not read ‘classics’ might assume is a ‘classic,’ simply because they’ve heard the title mentioned before, probably by a teacher. It’s the kind of book that no one actually reads unless assigned, except, perhaps, a precocious middle schooler.
It’s particularly telling that almost all of the recommended ‘classics,’ from Wilde to Keyes to Steinbeck, are short and, in my observation, almost always written by men. That white male writers seem to own the designation of ‘classic’ on BookTok is very telling: BookTok’s canons may include romance and bestsellers, but otherwise they uphold the standard, ‘classic’ English canon, albeit choosing the shortest possible book by any author. There is an obvious absence of what we might think of as ‘girlhood classics’—books like Jane Eyre, Little Women, or Pride & Prejudice, which are overwhelmingly white but still might be read by young women as ‘relatable.’ Perhaps they are too long, their language too archaic, their plots too unrelatable to attract readers used to Colleen Hoover’s novels. Consider these recommendations from user Sarah 📖✈️🤍(@sarah.lynne9), who gives Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich 5 stars (“the perfect 100 page book” and “a short but solid existential read”) and Emily Henry’s 400 page novel Happy Place 4.5 stars (“a story about friendship and second chances & growing old and drifting apart from the people you love…sad to say this hit a bit too close to home!”). Where Tolstoy’s novella is brilliant and existential, Emily Henry’s novel is relatable, speaking to specific conditions of contemporary adult life that the user has experienced. Within the recommendation itself, there’s a clear tension between the work of male authors—labeled as thought-provoking, interesting, the stuff of classics—and the work of female authors, which is relatable, emotionally moving, and soothing, easy reading. But in the end, Tolstoy and Henry are just half a star apart, basically the same. One is easy to read because of length, one is easy to read because of content. And easy reading is clearly one of the chief aesthetic criteria at play in the BookTok canon, as we can see in recent online discourse about BookTok readers who skip long paragraphs or avoid books written in the third person. If these books are mid, then mid seems one way of indexing what novels come to be when their readers don’t want to read at all.
Of course, there are book recommendations on BookTok that resist this canon formation, and users that dedicate their accounts to suggesting novels in translation, small indie press books, or underread contemporary poetry. And yet a mainstream canon of BookTok books exists, selling so well that bookstores often devote displays to BookTok or “Recommended by TikTok” titles. In summer 2022, Barnes & Noble and TikTok created a BookTok Challenge that reiterated the real-world popularity of the community, cheerfully reporting that “With nearly 11M videos and reaching over 60B views globally to date, #BookTok is the go-to hashtag for books, reading, writing and everything in between and it’s just one delightful corner of TikTok that has led to a widespread cultural impact off platform.” This “widespread cultural impact off platform” is one name for the increase in sales that meant Colleen Hoover outsold the Bible in 2022, though it’s my contention that the contours of this “cultural impact” have not been seen in their entirety, particularly not the effects on writers and readers. Viral posts like this one make clear that the effects of BookTok’s house style—the contours of which deserve another, longer essay—have made reading an experience of consuming narratives that are personally satisfying and fulfilling, not an experience of encountering otherness or language or fundamental truths about existence.
In screenshotted carousels, stop motion videos of book stacks, or GRWM (get ready with me) chats about books, the form of the BookTok recommendation generally offers up the BookTok canon with no edits. There’s a kind of comfort in how these videos blur together; the consensus does make BookTok feel like a community. These recommendation videos speak only to each other, ask each other to agree and then maybe we can be best friends?? Even the BookTok recommendations that seem to try to elevate themselves above others, including a random ‘classic,’ are less departures from the form as ways to reiterate the BookTok canon’s supremacy.
But what of the form of these recommendations? What strikes me most is the algorithmic nature of these ‘mid’ recommendations. The inclusion of a book like Flowers for Algernon feels random—it’s a departure from the other recs in terms of author, genre, style, time of publication—but it is also very motivated. It’s the same reason that other users post “books to read for sad girl fall” or “a book for every zodiac sign”—in those recommendation videos, the linking logic is clear. But in your average BookTok recommendation, the organizing logic is more subtle: what brings all the books together is the reader/user. The ultimate goal of the user—the creator, if you’re inclined—is to present the self as a reader and appeal to a particular reading public.
There’s a tension at play here. Since BookTok’s own canons are repetitive and boring, suggesting the same authors and the same abstract blobby covers, the user is motivated to construct themselves as a person of taste. The one odd addition to the stack of book recommendations, the copy of Flowers for Algernon or The Importance of Being Earnest, is the one distinguishing moment that makes the video unique. It’s a sly mirror of the same logic that idealizes reading as a simple task for self-fulfillment (and on the non-fiction sides of TikTok, self-actualization, via reading Atomic Habits): books should work for you, for your specific taste. Recommendations reiterate that you should like the same things as everyone else, offering one interesting addition that never calls into question or undermines the BookTok canon but subtly expands its reach.
This is the aesthetic logic of algorithms. Through these forays into a ‘serious literary canon,’ BookTok users mirror what their own FYP pages (or Spotify’s music or X’s homepage) can do: these algorithms give users exactly what they expect, plus one new, slightly different addition. These choices generate interest and engagement, as well as a sense of the boundaries of consensus. There’s something personal in this video, the ‘classic’ rec says, and there’s a person behind this account. Who can blame users for mirroring the algorithms that structure how they see content, how they see books, even how they see the world? Who wouldn’t want a little organization, a couple of standard recommendations to anchor yourself in Amazon’s overwhelming books page, where any title is available to you? As anthropologist Nick Seaver shows so convincingly in his book Computing Taste, algorithmic recommendation comes to be figured as necessary in part “to mitigate the overwhelming effects of an otherwise utopian age of information access.” The narrative of information overload is compelling, staging a deluge of culture and information rushing towards the lone, overwhelmed user: only the algorithms can handle such a staggering amount of data. Algorithms filter and feed the user what titles they think they will like, in processes that work like Seaver’s shows to be inextricably social and human, however much we might discursively figure algorithms as impersonal and rational. On BookTok, users reflect their place in such an algorithmic system through displays of personal taste, displays that borrow literariness from even the most mid titles by ‘classic’ authors.
Books operate on TikTok as an aesthetic, an identity marker, and a shared interest that connects readers across time and space. But the formation of BookTok classics, the formation of a canon that runs irregularly but inevitably across the canons of the academy, ought to be a topic of serious study.
Of course, the BookTok canon is undoubtedly mid. Even its foray into ‘serious’ or ‘highbrow’ literary canons feel deeply middling, finding the very shortest, most basic titles from even excellent authors. But read through the algorithm, in an expanded, cultural sense, BookTok canons look like they might signal a coherent aesthetic logic, one that might help us define what the contours of the mid look like and how they perpetuate in apps and spaces like TikTok. As Seaver writes, “As algorithms change and grow, they do not follow some exorable algorithmic logic that determines what they will be like. Rather, at every moment, people are making decisions and evaluating their consequences.” Behind the algorithm, there are people. And in front of the algorithm, reflecting its tastes and aesthetics, there are more people—readers—who want to read books with people like them, about people like them. In the end, the mid recommendation seems to index just how middling the contemporary canons of literature are, just how resistant to friction their readers can be.
Bekah Waalkes is a postdoc at Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, where she researches contemporary literature, attention, and the novel form. Outside of the world of books, her favorite pastime is cloud watching