Caitlin Bea has read Colleen Hoover's entire backlist, all 29 books, and she will defend every single one of them. Not because they're perfect. Because they work.
The New York-based BookTok creator, who pivoted from beauty YouTube to books during the pandemic, told Ponton that she actively recommends Hoover to new readers, despite the constant online pile-on. Her reasoning? Most people aren't looking for art. They're looking for a reason to put down their phones. Hoover's books, with their short chapters and cliffhanger endings, are reverse-engineered for dopamine-fried attention spans. Bea calls Verity the book that hooked her after years of reading maybe one self-help title annually and deciding reading "wasn't for me."
"Her skull cracked," Bea recalls of Verity's opening line. "And I was like, 'What is going on?'"
That was six years ago. She's been on BookTok ever since.
The case for starting with trash
Bea's argument for Hoover is practical, not romantic. She frames it as a product question: what does a lapsed reader actually need? Not Pride and Prejudice. Not Sally Rooney. Something bingeable. Something that makes you forget you're holding a book instead of scrolling.
"I feel like you're just looking for something to get off of your phone, something that's going to entertain you," Bea said. "There's just something bingeable about her books that you, you know, the chapter ends and you have to turn the page."
Ponton agreed, recounting her own Hoover spiral, reading November 9, Verity, and Ugly Love back to back. Bea's top five Hoover books? Verity, Hopeless, Ugly Love, November 9, and Maybe Someday. She ranks Hopeless second but notes it needs content warnings. She read Hoover's debut, Slammed, last and could tell it was rougher than the later work. Her advice: read it early in your Hoover run so you don't notice the gap.
The Hoover backlist is a gateway, not a destination. Bea moved from thrillers to romance, from Hoover to Riley Sager to Carley Fortune to Chloe Walsh's Binding 13, which Ponton read in seven days and called the only character-driven book that's ever held her attention. Bea tried it, took two months, gave up. She's a plot person. Ponton discovered she's a character person, but only for that one series.
The point is they both read now. That's the Hoover effect.
The pretentious reader problem
Bea's least favorite thing about BookTok? The people who treat it like AP English.
"If you're not reading the classics, then like you're reading trash and it's not it's not doing anything for the brain," she said, imitating the scolds. "Or like audiobooks aren't real. Like and and I just think like we just need to again like sit down."
Ponton cosigned hard. She described meeting readers in the wild who name-drop Jane Austen while she blanks on every book she's ever touched. "I almost disassociate the books to my real life," Ponton said. "So, like I go inside like la-di-da-di-da land and then I come back and I'm like..."
Bea admitted she sometimes feels pressure to read a classic to seem legitimate. But she's been doing this for six years. She knows what works. Her goal isn't to assign homework. It's to get people excited about reading again, and that means meeting them where they are. If that's Verity, fine. If that's a spicy rugby romance, also fine.
The celebrity book club conversation came up. Bea consumes BookTok recs, not Reese Witherspoon's picks, though she's heard Dua Lipa has taste. The problem with celebrity clubs, she suggested, is they skew serious. "I just need a light escape book and I don't know if they're reading light escape books," Ponton said. Bea laughed. "I just want like a little light reading and then call it a day."
What she's reading and what you should
Bea is currently toggling three formats: The Unknown by Riley Sager on Kindle, Lena Dunham's Reckoning (she called it Famous Sick in the conversation, likely an auto-caption error) on audiobook, and Daisy Haites by Jessa Hastings in physical form. She loves memoirs on audio when the author narrates. She loves Riley Sager in any format and has read his entire backlist. Her favorite? The Only One Left, which she swears doesn't twist until the 70% mark and then gives you whiplash.
Her three recs for new readers:
- One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune for a romance that feels like a location.
- The Favorites by Lane Fargo for a fast-paced, multi-POV audiobook about toxic Olympic figure skaters ("anytime something's about to go right, it goes wrong").
- The Only One Left by Riley Sager for a slow-burn thriller that pays off the setup.
Ponton pushed back on one: she's halfway through Yesteryear and finding the main character insufferable. Bea laughed. "I found her very insufferable," she admitted, but she ate it up anyway. She likes unhinged, unlikeable women. Ponton's not sure yet. The twist hasn't landed.
Bea's advice? Finish it, then text her.
The Sims career that never was
Before BookTok, Bea almost became a Sims streamer. She has a dedicated Sims computer because the game was frying her laptop. During the pandemic, she was playing obsessively and watching Sims creators the way other people watch reality TV. It was a genuine toss-up: books or Sims.
"I was like, 'Do I go full send to become a Sims creator?'" she said. "Cuz I was like, how fun just to just to play Sims all the time."
She talked to gamer friends about the setup requirements and realized streaming was a bigger commitment than filming book videos. Books won. She's glad. But the Sims computer still exists, and she still plays, and she's never talked about this on the internet before.
It's a reminder that BookTok creators aren't book people who went online. They're online people who found books. Bea started as a beauty YouTuber in 2010, kept it secret from her high school for two years, lived a "Hannah Montana" double life in Minnesota, moved to LA, burned out on makeup tutorials during the pandemic, dug up an ancient Kindle, read Verity, and six years later has built a second career arguing that Colleen Hoover is good, actually.
Not because the prose is pristine. Because she gets people to read.