The first time I read Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” I ended up on the bathroom floor crying so hard I needed to use my childhood inhaler.

Some call it empathy. Some call it effective writing. Some call it the consequences of BookTok, a subgenre of content on TikTok about books and reading. 

BookTok made millions of people in a so-called disconnected generation with abysmal attention spans pick up and complete an 814-page novel. There is power for good here. 

It also has lots of critics, and they advance two main arguments: the subgenre promotes books rich with pornographic material and it aestheticizes reading more than it values the content itself. Both are true. 

Romance has always been a dominant genre, but “smut” (a rebrand of the genre with more explicit material) has seen quite the renaissance due to the visibility BookTok grants it. Especially after the popularity of E.L. James’ “50 Shades of Grey” series in the early 2010s, the normalization of producing erotic content more readily for women has grown. 

It becomes cause for concern when smut starts sneaking into books marketed to young adults, which BookTok does. Novels like “It Ends With Us” by American author Colleen Hoover include elements of abusive and toxic partners alongside sexual material. While some may rejoice in young adults reading “anything,” others are worried that marketing this style of content to children celebrates and normalizes pornography.

As for the aestheticization of reading, the only people truly bugged by this are those who smugly describe themselves as “true readers.” If making videos titled “books for femme fatales” or “books to read if you’re in a depressive spiral” are actually getting people to pick up books, the politics of how they got from point A to point B are irrelevant. That is where the joy of people reading “anything” is sound.

The quality of the art you consume is up to you, and everyone needs a balanced diet with their reading lists as they do with their meals. A little bit of “Twilight” alongside “Crime and Punishment” won’t kill you or make your literary opinions invalid. In fact, reading might become what it once was to many people as kids: an escape. 

Walk into any bookstore — local mom and pop shops or juggernauts like Barnes & Noble — and you’ll likely see a table dedicated to trending reads. It is easy to have an aversion to displays like this, and to puff your chest out as you head for the classics section. 

Yet for years, Yanagihara’s novel has been on those tables. Although I might warn readers about its content if I see them playing with the cover, I’m grateful social media bullied me into reading it.

“A Little Life” is a beautiful story about four friends and the evolution of their friendship over decades with a heavy emphasis on the character of Jude. Jude’s story is what divides audiences, and discourse about the novel dominates a large sector of BookTok. His traumatic experiences being assaulted, kidnapped, and tortured are either praised for their profound detailing of a tragic man’s life or dismissed as “trauma porn.” 

Regardless of readers’ thoughts on Jude, “A Little Life” is one of, if not the, success story of BookTok. The 2015 novel was acclaimed upon release. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and won the Kirkus Prize in Fiction, all in its first year of publication. But once the novel began garnering a cultish following on social media, it became a pivotal part of BookTok culture and still is to this day.

The deeply disturbing parts of the novel can become “kitschy” and easy ways for queasy readers to avoid topic matters they’re uncomfortable with, which is fair. But for those who want to embark on a contemporary tale of a complex narrative about what happens when the worst of the worst is right under our noses, “A Little Life” is at our doorstep. 

“A Little Life” is a case study in the power of BookTok. The novel shows that when quality works are caught up in the trend cycle of the internet, they just might impact more people than if they had been removed from the cycle all together. 

There are real negative consequences of BookTok, as there are with any subgenre of the internet that inevitably becomes interwoven with commercial success. But if publishers and readers are able to parse through the nonsense and find the works that have the power to shape generations — then we may be better off than we thought.