According to Alina

Who knows, really?

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the hate started and whether it is just people hating to be haters because that's a feature of the Internet or if people actually have valid points in their criticism of BookTok.

I think the fact that romance and the so-called spicy books are so popular on BookTok plays a huge role in this.

Obviously, people have been reading romance and erotica books for ages.

I recently went to Romania, which is where I'm from, to my grandfather's house.

And I found a bunch of those sort of mills and boons, very cheesy cover romance novels that my mom used to read back in the 90s.

So clearly people have been reading this type of book for a very long time, but it's now super popular to talk about it.

I guess they used to be a bit of a guilty pleasure for a lot of women.

And now there are these young women online who are talking about it and

sort of recommending them to each other and hyping them up essentially.

And some of these books are now the best selling books in the world.

So for people who take literature a little bit more seriously, I can see why this might be annoying because it's not exactly the most literary type of writing, let's say.

And I don't know, the idea of or identity of literature

being a reader or a serious reader in inverted commas is something that people are very gatekeepy around.

And so people get touchy when somebody calls themselves a reader or brags about reading hundreds of books a year only to then discover that it's pulp fiction.