Last year, I stopped logging my books on Goodreads. I was tired of not meeting my reading goal on the platform year after year. Each time I would log onto the app, the joy of reading a new book was instantly clouded by disappointment at the time it had taken me to finish it. The sole purpose of my reading was that it could be used to generate data about me, as if it were a performance for the gaze of the machine. It felt like my entire literary pursuit was deemed valuable only when reduced to user statistics.
This is exactly what the algorithm wants: that we stop thinking for ourselves. The less we bring to the scroll, the more impressionable we are to the discourse. We are meant to forget that there are realities that exist beyond these echo chambers and become increasingly dismissive of opinions that stray from our worldview. In an atmosphere like this, critical thinking and reading become small acts of self-reliance. Only when we read do we really gain the power to form original thought. Below, a list of books that will think with you instead of for you.
1. Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy
A genre-bending cerebral work that is part-fiction, part-criticism, Exquisite Cadavers, a novel about a young couple navigating love in London, is a real-time lesson in critical thinking. One of the key skills of awareness is being able to hold two contradictory perspectives simultaneously without collapsing one onto the other. This is the structure of the book, too, as it builds alternate spaces for two strains of the author’s thinking. Drawing from a well of literary history, Kandasamy places her work at the crossroads of creating and critiquing, and has similar aspirations for the reader.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
