TickTok Book Recommendations Are too Unusual and Generic

Every genre is special and I like reading new things once in a while. Finding book recommendations can be a bit tricky though. I find my recommendations from Readers I follow on goodreads who are okay and some have questionable reviews but they are more or less okay-ish. This depends on peoples tastes though, what they want to do and what they find joy in reading.

Now I have gone into the deep dark booktock and I have to say it’s getting to me in ways that it simply shouldn’t be doing. Let me explain. For those who don’t know what ticktok is, it’s a platform where users can watch short videos any topic or lifestyle videos and they can comment or like it and if you watch a specific type of genre the algorithm show you more of the same type of videos you like, so the more you watch car videos the more you stay on cartok, meaning you stay in a specific section of the app that displays specific types of videos.

This means that if I watch more than eighteen types of videos about books the algorithm gives me more videos on that and that’s how I got into BookTok. I have talked about this a few times when I wrote an article here about a Book Song of Achilles that I always saw on booktok being recommended constantly.

I loved reading Song of Achilles and it was exciting and it made my heart ache to no end. I won’t spoil it for anyone but all you need to know is that it is a Greek retelling of The great battle of Troy through Patroclus’s eyes who is also the main character of this book aside from Achilles.

With the success of booktok winning me over with song of Achilles I decided I’m going to see if they can give me more books to read and become obsessed with. This is where I made a mistake, a big horrible mistake. The more I watched the book recommendation things, the more I realized that a lot of them are for the same book recommendations. I began my first book with A court od Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and let me tell you I hated every second of it but I was determined to finish it.

Yes I do like fantasy and no I was not being bias at all. For one I never knew the author nor have ever red her books before so I could not be bias in any way. I think I’ll write a few articles on the books to vent out my frustrations in detail but right now all you should know is that I hated it.

A Court of Thorn and Roses is a Young Adult Fantasy book that has gotten a lot of praise and is absolutely everywhere on booktok, and it seems like people were giving out the highest reviews. The book is not a stand-alone and has different books tied to eat but trust me when I say I will not be reading any one of them ever again. Again I will explain this is another article in the course of the week.

After the disappointment of A court of Thorns and Roses, I decided I should read something light hearted and a cute romance book. I was wrong again, by this point it’s not really shocking but bear with me. I read The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, This was enjoyable to a degree it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great either. I had trouble understanding the characters and relating to them, the whole teacher and student dynamic wasn’t bad only because she was a graduate but still I was a bit hesitant. By the end of it all I found myself enjoying the book but not liking it enough to tell anyone. I wasn’t invested in the characters like I said. So I did a little google research and found out that the book was originally a fanfic between star wars characters called Rey and Kylo Ren. Me being the stalker that I am decided to go to YouTube and find out who these characters where because I knew nothing about them. After I watched a few fan video compilations I realized that the reason why I couldn’t keep the characters in my mind is because they’re personalities were not displayed well in the book. You needed to be a fan of the star wars universe to see their personalities in the book because you see them.

Then we come to November 9 by Colleen Hoover. Now heads up, I’m already bias in advance with her but Booktok said no, Ugly Love and it All Ends With us are amazing you should read them all we promise.

I read one of her books November 9 years ago when I was 17 and I still think that it’s toxic and never sat well with me, but who would I’ve if I didn’t listen to a girl with crystals in her hair saying Ugly Love and It All Ends with us changed her life and it would change mine too. Well I wish I could find her give her a good punch in the face because it ruined me. I have never been so upset about books in my whole life and I’ve read wattpad gay fanfiction about one direction!

I think it’s safe to say that I don’t like her books and if you do great, everyone has different tastes. I even went on YouTube and good reads to see if there are others who think the same as me and surprise, surprise there were plenty of them and I felt validated in my anger.

But there are good things that came from this, for example I finally read The Seven Husbands of Emily Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reed and I loved it, not enough to say this is my new obsession but it was nice, and really edgy.

I also tried People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry and now that was my favorite one, it was fun, there was so much depth and history in the characters it made me happy and it was a good read.

For now I think it’s safe to say I would not be taking recommendations from booktok for now and stick to book reads reviews.