There was a time when reading was one of the few acts that remained private.
A book was encountered alone: on a taxi, bus or train during the commute home; beneath a blanket on a winter evening or on the sofa with jazz music playing softly in the background in a room of one’s own.
The relationship unfolded quietly, between a reader and a page, beyond the gaze of anyone else.
But in the internet age, before a novel is even opened, it has often been photographed, the initial response to the cover has been filmed and the book has been arranged beside a matcha on a café table, bookmarks, highlighters and sticky notes to set the mood that this is how I read: cosy and non-threatening.
Spend enough time at 44 Stanley and you’ll probably recognise him. Baggy trousers. A fitted polo shirt. Wired, plugged in earphones. A tote bag resting against the chair. A copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or bell hooks’s All About Love open on the table. Every now and then he looks up, watching people pass before returning to the book.
I have often wondered whether he is reading in public for pleasure or performing the act of reading. Was it for the female gaze? New York City held a satirical contest for the performative male last year.
This bruised me a bit as a self-proclaimed soft boy who religiously reads feminist and queer Bipoc (black, indigenous and people of colour) literature. Was I performing too? Are we all performing?
A woman screams into her phone camera, violently sobbing and in her hands is a copy of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. “Why did you write this!” she screams on Tiktok. Since early 2020, #Booktok has become an integral part of the international literary field.
The hashtag represents a subcommunity on the social media app TikTok where books are the central commodity which has its counterparts like BookTube and Bookstagram on YouTube and Instagram respectively.
Publishers credit it with reviving backlist titles, launching debut authors onto bestseller lists and persuading a generation raised on short-form video that reading can be exciting.
Bookstores dedicate entire shelves to books “As Seen on TikTok” and “TikTok sensation”. Romance novels, fantasy epics and literary fiction alike arrive with stickers announcing their viral status.
When I worked in a bookstore, I struggled with this category. What exactly made a book a “BookTok book”? Was it the writing? The cover? The minimalist typography?
The more I engaged with customers browsing those tables, the more I realised they were often recognising books before they knew what they were about.
Certain covers had become instantly familiar because they had circulated online. The aesthetic arrived before the story.
The most popular ones included Rebecca Yarros’s Iron Flame, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us and titles from Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series. Romantasy was an especially favoured genre but the books often lacked emotional depth and were sometimes careless in dealing with sensitive themes.
None of this is necessarily a criticism. BookTok has encouraged people to read. It has revived bookshops, built communities and introduced readers to authors they might never have encountered otherwise.
But I find myself wondering whether it has also quietly changed what reading asks of us.
A book can no longer simply be enjoyed. It also has to be seen.
Publishers have adapted to this reality as part of their marketing strategy. Jonathan Ball Publishers, for example, runs monthly read-alongs where selected book content creators receive the latest book. Most recently Yesteryear — a polarising debut novel by Caro Claire Burke — was chosen and sent to content creators in exchange for reviews and social media content.
I spoke to several South African book influencers about the campaigns. Some thought the expectations were fair. Others admitted they sometimes felt pressure to read faster than they wanted to, post even when they had little to say or remain visible online because they worried they might not be selected again.
What struck me wasn’t whether the arrangement was fair or unfair. It was that reading no longer seemed enough. The experience also had to be narrated and performed on camera.
BookTok has transformed reading into a visible identity and as a former book reviewer who collaborated with different publishers, I remember constantly being approached by self-published authors to review their books.
I quickly noticed that reading was no longer my happy place, as something Debra Levy elegantly defines happiness in Things I Don’t Want to Know: “When happiness is happening it feels like nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense”.
I thought about this quote a lot, how happiness was no longer happening for me because of the expectations and performance required of me for this free book.
During literary events I met people who linked my identity to “the guy who writes book reviews and talks about books on TikTok” . My identity was linked to a singular aspect of who I am and nothing else.
People assumed I was intelligent or they just wanted to speak to me about books and contemporary politics. Not knowing I am a pantsula who cosplays as a spiritual baddie at times. That is one of the dangers of existing in online communities. You can exist only as a singular. You must feed the algorithm.
Trust me, I miss receiving books from publishers.
I’ve joined reading and political groups that speak to me without wanting a performance or an “I am a reader” aesthetic.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu believed taste is never entirely personal. The books we own, display and recommend communicate something about who we are or perhaps who we hope to be.
A copy of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History beside a black coffee says something different from a dog-eared Colleen Hoover novel. A bookshelf filled with Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, bell hooks and Toni Morrison tells its own story. Whether we intend it or not, books have become social signals. Books in many ways have become a status symbol.
Of course, readers have always done this. Books have always helped people find communities and shape identities. Reading also happened collectively.
Anti-colonial, cultural activists like Medu Art Collective treated literature as a viable tool to revolutionise societies rather than something to be privately consumed. Workshops and publications became spaces where people debated politics and liberation. Reading was less about individual identity and more about collective progress.
South Africa’s literary history reminds me that books
have long carried a different kind of weight. Under apartheid, legislation such as the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), the Public Safety Act (1953) and the Publications and Entertainments Act (1963) sought to control what people could read because the state understood that books could cultivate political consciousness and resistance.
Works by writers such as Steve Biko and André Brink were banned, while other writers, like Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahlele, were forced into exile, continuing to write about a country they could no longer call home. At the same time, Drum magazine created a literary home for black writers and readers, documenting everyday life. It offered an alternative way of seeing South Africa, one that apartheid could neither fully censor nor erase.
That history exists in the spaces where I have come to understand what reading can do. I think of afternoons at The Forge during political revival sessions, where books are rarely the end point of the conversation. I think of comrades thinking together and engaging in heated debates around shared meals.Discussions move between Pan-Africanism, socialism and feminism, not as abstract theories but as living traditions that help make sense of the present.
Reading there is not about proving that you’ve finished a book or displaying it for an audience. It is about remembering, questioning and imagining other ways of living together with deep care. I always leave those sessions feeling lifted or questioning my own ideas, politics and philosophies.
Perhaps this is what South Africa brings to the conversation about BookTok. Here, reading has never only been about personal taste or identity.
It has been about preserving memory, building communities, sustaining political traditions and imagining freer futures. If BookTok asks what a book says about the reader, South Africa’s literary tradition asks what reading makes possible.