A Millennial’s Frustrating Encounter With BookTok

When aesthetics and oversensitivity overshadow the essence of reading

Joe Treetop
The Point of View
Published in
7 min readJan 29, 2024

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A teenager wearing an “I love BookTok” t-shirt, surrounded by hovering books he is promoting and a camera mounted on a tripod. He’s sitting at a desk with a laptop and more books.
Image created by the author on PlaygroundAI

I vowed never to begrime my character with “TikYuck” — but, admittedly, I yielded. In desperate self-justification, I convinced myself that since this was purely for research, it warranted a teensy moral escape clause.

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Joe Treetop
The Point of View

Essayist on the peculiar and delightfully absurd aspects of life, guilty of wielding satire | Culture needs dissecting, and I have just the sharpie!