The two strangest ones I can think of were fairly recent.

One was in 2019 when I was working at a local museum; one of my tasks was to sit in the ticket booth, which was generally pretty quiet and afforded the opportunity to listen to the radio or read when no one was around. One day I came to work and had forgotten my book, but was happy to find that an anonymous coworker had left a battered old paperback in the break room. I borrowed it for my shift and then returned it, but no one ever came back to claim it and no other coworker I asked knew who it belonged to, so eventually I just took it home. As it happened, it was The Way of Kings (which I had never heard of) and I really enjoyed it, but you can imagine my surprise when all of my friends started reading it and raving about it in 2022 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The second story was when I was living and working in France in the summer of that same year. I had brought a few English books with me, but quickly worked my way through them and was down to borrowing books from my friends or searching for English-language books in the local stores. The residence where we were staying had a number of mail lockers downstairs, which our group didn't use but which we had to pass by in order to leave the building. One day I was on my way out when I happened to glance at the row of lockers and noticed a book sitting on the top - it seemed like it had been left on the floor and some passerby had stuck it up there to keep it from being stepped on. I pulled it down out of curiosity and realized it was an English-language copy of Good Omens, my favourite book of all time - and it was the edition I owned, the 90s edition with the black cover. The serendipity of finding an English-language copy of my favourite book in my favourite edition in the locker room of a university residence in small-town France was too good to pass up, so I took it with me and it kept me company for the rest of my travels!

I grew up as someone with very little cultural or historical identity - a white kid born in a settler colonial nation, with no real connection to my country or language of origin, decidedly unreligious and raised by parents with few strong political or social beliefs. All that nothingness can leave you pretty hollow, especially as I became an adult and realized that I had no true community or sense of connection to the world around me. It was Robert Macfarlane's Underland that first genuinely reached out and grounded me, validated the intense inexplicable emotion I've always felt when confronted with the scope and breadth of human history. Macfarlane was the first person besides myself to express the same kind of overwhelm I experience in those moments, and made me realize that the profound loneliness I've felt without a community around me is unfounded - I belong to a species that has lived and died and loved and fought and cooked and eaten and created for hundreds of thousands of years, and none of us are ever truly alone. I could honestly quote the entire book, but here's one from the very beginning that touched me so profoundly:

>I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that 'the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright.' The intimacy of that posture is moving to me - the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble and I hope you enjoy :)