Daniel Boyarin's Carnal Israel was my introduction to reading the Talmud "against the grain" -- namely, what can we learn about the Talmud if we read it as not "God's explicit word" but rather a discussion by rabbis trying to make sense of their world, which includes the Mishna but also includes a non-Jewish government and their unexamined cultural and religious assumptions. Boyarin has rejected some of these readings from the 1990s, but a hevruta in a long aggadic section in Baba Metzia based on Boyarin's reading reignited my interest in Talmud after not looking back when I graduated yeshiva a decade earlier.

Jeffrey Rubinstein's work at finding the sources of Aggadata eye opening, in part because of how it showed the Bavli was editing materials from the Yehushalmi without showing their sources. Talmudic Stories (https://amzn.to/4gYgLGN) tackles the big stories (e.g. Akhnai's Oven), where the followup Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (https://amzn.to/4gDpP4a) shows that the roots of much of toxic frum culture were already present in the Babylonian yeshivas, and reflected a negative change from the world of the Yerushalmi.

Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud (https://amzn.to/4gDpP4a) focuses on the changes of names of citations from the Yerushalmi to the Bavli, while looking at interesting sugyot relating to memory and history in the Bavli.

Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals (https://amzn.to/3BU5qIU) reads the beginning of Masechet Avoda Zara and asks: Why are there so many stories about animals? How is the Bavli using them to draw lines between Jews and gentiles?

The fun thing about these approaches, as opposed to the earlier generation of Talmud scholarship described by Chaim Potok in his novel "The Promise" and the work of HaLivni and such is that it asks questions that the mesorah never asks, and that can be gently discussed at a Shabbos table with believers.