Olivia Ponton Hated Reading as a Kid. Then She Found the Right Book.

Olivia Ponton did not consider herself a reader as a child. The TikTok star and influencer-turned-podcast host was raised 10 minutes from the beach in Naples, Florida, and says instead of diving into books, she was “in the ocean damn near every single day of my life.” When she was in middle school, she thought one of her teachers hated her, so she tried to win a reading competition to charm her, selecting the “tiniest little books that you can find in the library” to give her an advantage. But other than that, Ponton says she did the bare minimum: “I remember we were forced to read The Giver and To Kill a Mockingbird, and I remember just going on SparkNotes or whatever and getting the information from that because I was like, there is not a chance that I’m reading this book. Or I would try, but I’d read the same paragraph five times and be like, ‘What?’”

She’s clearly come around on the matter in the years since. As the host of the popular book-club podcast, Booked, Blonde, & Busy, which is midway through its second season, Ponton interviews her favorite authors about everything from their lives and writing processes to who they’d cast in the film adaptation of their books. She may have come to reading for pleasure later in life, but she’s making up for lost time now. And while Ponton is hardly the first celebrity or influencer to try to get people reading again, unlike the big-name celeb book clubs that tend to all select the same handful of high-minded titles that appear on every awards shortlist, Ponton’s tastes are far more approachable. (Authors she’s interviewed include Colleen Hoover, Veronica Roth, Carley Fortune.) And if she can do for books what she’s done for workout videos and dance trends, then there just might be hope after all. “If I can influence anyone to read or to think that reading is cool,” Ponton says, “then my job is done.”

It’s a Friday morning in late September in Dumbo, and we’ve just come from a podcast taping with Hoover, who Ponton calls her “dream guest.” As we nibble on sandwiches from a nearby vegan café, she begins to tell me how she went from hating books to loving them.

Ponton says she didn’t have many friends in school (“people didn’t love me at my high school,” she explains), so she turned to social media and discovered, “Oh my god, I can make friends here,” she recalls. She joined TikTok in late 2019, just before the pandemic-fueled boom the following year, posting trends and workout videos. “As much as it’s a job now, it was purely fun at that point in time,” Ponton says. “And never in a million years did I picture that would equal all of this.”

Her first viral post was a short, low-quality workout video that she never expected to perform. She uploaded it and then sat down at the dinner table with her family, where there were no phones allowed. “I went back and checked my phone and after maybe 30 minutes, it was at a million views. I was like, ‘Whoa,’ I had never seen anything like that,” she says. “And then it gained a million more views every hour, and then it got to 10 million views, and I was like, ‘What the actual crap is happening?’ It was so incomprehensible to me to even process what a million views meant.” Before long, she had a sizable following. “Everything else just kept performing really well, and it was such an out-of-body experience,” Ponton says of her early days on the platform. But she got what she wanted most out of it: “More importantly, I made friends,” she says. “So that was the highlight.”

When she graduated high school in May 2020, it was a COVID-conscious event. “I drove up in my Chevy Malibu and they gave me my diploma in the car and I was like, ‘Thank you,’” she says. “That was it.” She turned 18 at the end of the month, packed two suitcases, and moved to Los Angeles to live in the Hype House, a mansion in the Hollywood Hills where a rotating cast of TikTok and YouTube content creators holed up together. It was her college education, of sorts. “I grew up really, really quick because you have to, you all of a sudden are being asked questions that are big girl decisions,” Ponton says. “And I’m like, ‘Girl, I’m 18 years old. What do you mean what do I want to do with my finances? What’s a tax? What is a retirement fund?’”

When Ponton lived in the Hype House, there were 14 men and three women. “I try to explain that it’s like a frat house, but with people who have no sense of money or time,” she says. “It felt like I was living in a movie. I’d wake up and everyone would just be drunk all day running around, doing these insane skits, and filming YouTube videos. Random big name people would just walk in and I’d be like, ‘Why are they in my house?’”

After 11 months, she’d had enough. She met with a modeling agency to discuss her lifelong dream of modeling for Victoria’s Secret. “I remember watching their models in the 2014 era that every girl watched with my Oreos being like, ‘Mom, I want to do that,’” she says. The agency told her that to have a chance, she’d have to move to New York City. “I literally moved two weeks later. I was like, ‘I’m here, babe. I’m here. Send me in,’” she recalls. Eventually she got her dream job and proceeded to model for VS and others for the next several years in addition to continuing as a content creator.

In December 2021, she was stuck inside her apartment, sick with COVID, when she spied a book (Crave by Tracy Wolff) on her shelf that her uncle had given her as a gift two years prior. “I’d watched every single show on Netflix, so I was just wandering around my apartment, bored out of my mind, and I was like, ‘What if I just tried to read this book?’” she says. She read 20 pages and then fell asleep. The next day, she gave it a proper go, and before she knew it, she had read 250 pages. “I was just obsessed with the fact that I could have this imaginary world inside my brain that nobody else knew about,” Ponton says. She got into Hoover next, ultimately reading 20 of the prolific author’s 26 titles.