For as long as I have been a culture critic, I have been asked one question more than any other: do you have any book recommendations? The query always stumps me, because I do not know the reading habits of strangers, and I have found neither a polite nor sane way to tell someone to read one of my articles. I usually just suggest the last book I finished because I am sent a lot of them and getting to the end of one tells me, on an instinctive level, that I found something worth pursuing in its pages. Maybe this has given me a false impression of how fashionable reading is. I am certainly puzzled by headlines about the decline in its popularity – especially for literary fiction, and especially among young men. Though I can offer a less anecdotal piece of evidence against such claims: the unnerving, dizzying rise of BookTok.

A primer for anyone who has not developed a doomscroll addiction over the past few years. BookTok is a TikTok community, where “book influencers” – a term I doubt anyone enjoys using – share recommendations, reviews, as well as reading-related videos. The numbers are staggering. There are more than 50 million videos under the BookTok hashtag. In one such video, Ben Mercer, a self-labelled “bookman”, lists the stories he wishes he could read for the first time: it has over 300,000 likes, and has been viewed over three million times. (Mercer is a thoughtful, earnest follow.)

What do those figures amount to? A 2022 poll by the Publishers Association found that 59 per cent of people between 16 and 25 claimed BookTok “helped them discover a passion of reading”. While it is difficult to know exactly how the community has affected figures, sales in two genres that are popular on the app – the young adult and romance markets – are booming.

In each of the three central London bookshops I visited while researching this piece, there was a section on BookTok reads. Staff told me that customers, usually younger and usually women, often come in for books they have seen on TikTok. According to one shop assistant at Waterstones Piccadilly, they are very into “romantasy”, a mash-up of romance and fantasy that is hugely on TikTok and last year amassed an estimated $610 million in sales.

That same bookseller told me that there are different versions of BookTok and some skew more literary. This is where you will find influencers crying over Hanya Yanagihara’s weepy doorstopper A Little Life, any Sally Rooney novel or the International Klein Blue-coloured volumes from independent British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions.

It is fair to say that BookTok, like any fast-growing community, has evolved. Lucas Oakeley, a London-based writer who recommends “books for boys”, started making videos after he realised that TikTok’s male-focused reading lists usually comprised non-fiction and self-help. Titles that, as he puts it, present “reading as a tool for self-improvement or a means to make some kind of monetary gain [rather] than something to do for pure enjoyment”.

Oakeley suggests an eclectic mix of literary fiction and non-fiction to his audience, which he says is 81 per cent male. After Oakeley has hooked scrollers with a catchy opener – one of his videos, which has almost two million views, begins: “Get off Reddit and read a book instead” – he finds that men are “pretty receptive” to most genres. There is inevitably some backlash, usually from anonymous commenters calling choices “woke” or “gay”, but Oakeley remains hopeful. “If I can convince even just one per cent of those to read Giovanni’s Room, I’ll consider that a success,” he says, referring to James Baldwin’s 1956 queer classic.

He’s onto something. Now I like the accounts that recommend books I would never have given a second thought. Nathan Shuherk (@schizophrenicreads) goes deep on political non-fiction. Jack Edwards (@jackbenedwards) offers some insightful commentary on BookTok trends. Anyone with a sense of humour is good, like Zoe of @zoes_reads, who curates reading lists for “incredibly stupidly sensitive people” (couldn’t possibly relate!).

And if you take BookTok as another part of the reading process – one that involves going to shops, talking to people offline, muting your phone for an afternoon and sitting down with a story – then it becomes less rigid and a lot more intriguing. Even if you do not like the recommendations, you will always find conversation. These above-average comment sections form a virtual book club.

“You’re seeing a lot of people embracing reading as something that defines their sense of self,” Oakeley says. “Even if putting little Post-it notes on every single page seems excessive, it is much better than people making hard drugs or – God forbid – padel their entire personality.” It is hard to argue with that, so I do not.

For a fortnight, I embrace BookTok – both for research and because my summer reading list is looking lean – and it leads me to some nice finds. Seán Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide, a biography about the Kennedys and three Japanese novellas. Will I read those? Perhaps. But at the very least, I have options when I’m next asked for suggestions by a stranger at a dinner party.