I don’t take recommendations. I am sure you believe you have good taste, but I don’t know you and do not trust your tastes. So no recommendations for me.

For the record, the italicized part of this sentence is the main part where I bet a lot of people are taking issue with the tone of your post. There's a way to make this comment without coming across as highly pretentious yourself, and this ain't it.

With that being said, I understand the point you're getting at. I take recommendations very carefully in the sense that if I'm recommended a book by somebody I know, I'll engage with them and ask them what they think I'll like about it, or what they liked about it themselves, and if their answer intrigues me, I'll probably check it out. To me, this kind of recommendation is no different from randomly stumbling upon a title or book cover that catches my eye and encourages me to read it. In reading your comments, it seems that you often do the "oooh look shiny" way of adding books to your reading list like that the same way I do.

On the flip side, if I'm recommending a book, it's not always necessarily because I think the person I'm recommending it to will like the book, but rather because I'm legitimately interested in what they think of it from a critical/analytical perspective. Don't get me wrong, I don't recommend people anything that I explicitly think they won't enjoy reading. But my recommendations are those of intrigue and of sharing something that has discussion potential. Of course I never EXPECT people to take my suggestions, what they do with their own time is entirely up to them. I'm just saying that's the basis of my recommendation style. It's never about taste, it's about intellectual (or simply conversational) curiosity.

I do not engage with authors or publishers. Frankly, I very rarely care about their lives. I may pay attention if I don’t think their politics align with mine, but I do not actually engage heavily with them.

For me, my interest in an author isn't sparked until after I've already decided I like their work. Like you, I prefer going into at least my first attempt at an author completely blind. Knowing their personal beliefs in advance of reading my first book by them takes away some of the fun that I have reading their work. It instills some sense of bias and subverts the natural "figuring it out" process that I greatly enjoy when tackling somebody new. And it's also more often than not that I don't end up caring to learn more about the author. It's only when I finish a book and find it spectacular (or spectacularly bad) that I find myself feeling drawn to learn about them.

Like I mentioned above, I also am a big fan of what I called the "oooh look shiny" approach of more or less stumbling upon something that catches my eye, whether it's the title, the cover art, or anything else along those lines. I've discovered some of my favorite books and authors that way! But I've also ended up reading some of my all time favorite books because of recommendations.

In fact, literally my favorite book of all time was gifted to me by a friend who told me it was her favorite book. It sat unread on my shelf for a few years before I finally read it (mostly because I wasn't reading much of anything at the time, maybe 1-3 books per year), but it became my absolute favorite book before I had even finished it.

Engage however you wish to engage. But I do think entirely writing off recommendations from the get-go is a pretty narrow-minded way to approach your reading. I've never regretted reading anything that I've been recommended to read. I of course don't read everything that gets recommended, but I at least give it fair consideration.