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The best books of 2022, according to BookTok

December 14, 2022

BookTok is revolutionizing the literature world.

For the past two years, books have been climbing the charts not on the backs of movie and TV deals or some miraculous PR stunt, but because users on TikTok deemed it worthy.

Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at NPD Books, told the New York Times that TikTok has “made the transition from a novelty to a real anchor for the market. The whole idea of dominating supermarket shelves, dominating airport stores, dominating the front tables at bookstores, it’s just not really where it’s at in the same way.” According to BookScan, BookTok — the TikTok community of bibliophiles — helped authors sell 20 million books in print in 2021. In 2022, those sales went up 50 percent.

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Many of those sales are from fiction novels you’ve probably seen on supermarket shelves and in airport stores: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and literally anything by Colleen Hoover. The reason you’re seeing them take those spots isn’t lost on literary TikTokkers with a platform.

Not all TikTok books are fiction novels, although BookTok does tend to skew toward novels with fantasy elements, romance at the center, and tropes like the beloved “enemies to lovers.” More than anything, BookTok books are “relevant and relatable,” BookTokker Andrea, or @girlbossinred, told Mashable.

“The books that make people feel seen and heard or articulate the feelings or the thoughts that the readers can’t figure out on their own,” Andrea said. She predominantly focuses on nonfiction and literary fiction by women and people of color, but says books that do well on TikTok are typically “reflective of the pop culture moment or the cultural zeitgeist.” 

In 2022, BookTok owned the book world. So Mashable has compiled a list of BookTok’s must-read titles, making it easy to narrow down your next read or fulfill a friend’s holiday wishlist. In no particular order, here are 2022’s most popular books:

  • ​​It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  • How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo

  • Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

  • A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

  • Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

  • Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma

  • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

  • Babel by R. F. Kuang

  • Either/Or by Elif Batuman

  • The Night and It’s Moon by Piper CJ

  • How to Fall Out of Love Madly by Jana Casale

  • You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao

  • Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

  • A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

  • One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus

  • The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

  • The Guest List by Lucy Foley

  • Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  • Book Lovers by Emily Henry

  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

  • Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin

  • Verity by Colleen Hoover

  • Bunny by Mona Awad

  • All About Love by Bell Hooks

  • I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

  • This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar

  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 

  • The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

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