In case you find yourself worried that Kids These Days just aren’t what they used to be—in other words, what we used to be—here’s some heartening news: Pride and Prejudice recently won TikTok’s inaugural “Best BookTok Revival” award, given to a beloved but not-recently-published work.
In the past few years, TikTok’s legions of mostly young users–apparently undeterred by claims that the short-video platform is a cellphone Trojan horse engineered by the Chinese--have turned the app into a vehicle for reviewing and recommending books. And thus it is that we now have the newly minted TikTok Book Awards, created by the company’s UK/Ireland arm.
Whether Austen’s latest accolade represents quite as spontaneous a grassroots upwelling as TikTok would like us to believe remains an open question: Read the fine print, and you learn that the unspecified “thousands” of BookTok-ers who voted for the winners in each category were choosing from a list of three or four finalists “carefully curated” by a panel of experts, some of them with roots in the publishing industry.
The whole contest sounds suspiciously like a publicity stunt designed to anoint safe, wholesome choices--and, indeed, all the winning books are well-established, noncontroversial-except-in-Florida bestsellers, several of them already adapted for the screen. Don’t look here for edgy, surprising, or little-known gems.
Still, I hate to be churlish about anything that encourages reading, and hey: Pride and Prejudice may be a safe choice, but it’s also a great one.* The kids are probably all right.
* The books it beat out for the Best Revival title aren’t exactly slouches, either: two stone-cold masterpieces (Orwell’s 1984 and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go), and one hilarious and beautiful love story (David Nicholls’ One Day).