5 books to rescue you from brainrot

We have all been there, scrolling past AI-generated humanised cat lives (how dare Mrs. Meow cheat on Mr. Meow while he was on CEO duty?) hours on end, questioning whether our neurons are still firing. If your screen time report resembles a cry for help– because trust me, an 8-hour average is no definition of normalcy– and you have forgotten what paragraphs look like, perhaps, it is time to trade reels for reading. Here is a list of 5 books to nurse your brain back to health. 

Set against the backdrop of Cork during the tremors of the financial crash, The Rachel Incident follows Rachel, a university student working at a bookstore, whose life shifts dramatically after meeting James, an effervescent, larger-than-life classmate who quickly becomes both her roommate and her closest confidant. What begins as a friendship full of chaos, mischief, and youthful bohemian adventure soon takes on deeper shades when Rachel falls for her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne. With James by her side, she concocts elaborate plans to win him over, only to find herself entangled in a web of secrets that pulls not just her, but James, Fred, and Fred's elegant wife into a chain of compromises and betrayals. What Caroline O'Donoghue crafts is not simply a story of unrequited love or reckless youth, but of how friendship, desire, and ambition can collide in ways that are both intoxicating and devastating. Shot through with humour and aching honesty, the novel brims with the messy vitality of early adulthood, when every choice feels like both a disaster and a beginning.

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The death of the film and the rise of its maker

Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Longmans, Green and Co., 1932

When 19-year-old Flora Poste finds herself orphaned, she chooses not despair but practicality, deciding that her best option is to descend upon her eccentric relatives in rural Sussex. What awaits her at the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm is a cast of characters so steeped in doom and melodrama that they seem almost beyond parody: Judith, weighed down by endless guilt; Amos, consumed with fire-and-brimstone preaching; Seth, driven by lust; Reuben, by bitterness; Elfine, the ethereal child of nature; and at the center of it all, Aunt Ada Doom, who has not left her room in two decades after 'something nasty' she once saw in the woodshed. Yet Flora, sophisticated and unflappable, takes to the situation with brisk determination, imposing her sense of order on the chaos around her. For fans of Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm is surely far more fascinating than an animated monkey dancing to 'My Money Don't Jiggle Jiggle.' 

Amra Hetechhi Jara
Imtiar Shamim
Pendulum Publishers, 2021

Now, on a serious note (and you do need your history lessons), Imtiar Shamim's Amra Hetechhi Jara tells the parallel stories of Tathagata, a boy marked by loss, and of a country stumbling through the aftermath of its liberation. With a freedom fighter father and a mother gone in a refugee camp, Tathagata grows up too soon, his youth consumed by the turbulence of coups, crackdowns, and shifting regimes. He loves, envies, and desires, yet remains helpless in the face of a nation unravelling before his eyes, while friends around him are beaten, silenced, or lost to violence. In his quiet paralysis lies the novel's force, a reflection of a Bangladesh caught between hope and betrayal, survival and disillusionment. Brief but piercing, Shamim's work is a bold reconstruction of the post-war era, laying bare the griefs of both a man and a nation still learning how to carry its history. 

The Queue
Basma Abdel Aziz, Elisabeth Jaquette (Translator)
Melville House, 2016

In the aftermath of a failed uprising, a city is transformed by the rise of the Gate, a faceless authority extending control into every corner of daily life, yet whose doors never open. Citizens queue endlessly for permission to conduct even the simplest acts– buying food, seeking medical care, or attending to the wounds inflicted by the very unrest that brought the Gate to power. Such is the case with Yehia, a man shot during the protests, whose life slowly deteriorates because officials refuse to acknowledge the bullet lodged in his body, denying both reality and compassion. It falls to Tarek, a principled doctor, to decide whether to uphold the rigid rules of a system built on denial or to act against it in the hope of saving a life. Abdel Aziz's novel is at once surreal and piercingly familiar, blending Kafkaesque absurdity with Orwellian dread, illuminating the ways absolute authority manipulates truth, erases suffering, and immobilises the people it governs. 

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Stepping Stones
Lucy Knisley
Random House Graphic, 2020

And this one is for the mukbang-addicts, the recipe-scrollers, the eating-Jollibee-for-the-first-timers who have spent more time watching other people eat than thinking about their own lives (guilty as charged): Stepping Stones by Lucy Knisley. Jen is used to not getting what she wants, so moving to the countryside and suddenly acquiring stepsisters should not come as too much of a shock, yet it feels like the end of the world. She did not want to leave the city, or her friends, or her father behind; but most of all, she did not want to inherit Andy and Reese, two stepsisters who seem to have been born perfect in ways unachievable for a regular human. On Peapod Farm, chores pile up like the hay in the barn, the local farmers' market waits for no one, and Jen finds herself struggling with insecurities she never knew she had– about family, belonging, and who she is supposed to be in this new life. The story is tender, funny, and quietly triumphant, a portrait of adolescence caught between frustration and discovery, of the slow, unpredictable ways a family, either chosen or imposed, can become home.

Nur-E-Jannat Alif is a gender studies major and part-time writer who dreams of authoring a book someday. Find her at @literatureinsolitude on Instagram or send her your book/movie/television recommendations at [email protected].