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!

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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 :)

Gawande has written some of the best passages I've ever read on the end stage of life. Great book.

His perspectives on elderly and end stage care are quite refreshing. All his books are excellently, very humanely written. ‘Complications’ is another favourite.

This book is great. Well written and very illuminating.

If you are older than 55, if you have a relative older than 55, or if you work in a helping profession you should read this book now. Everyone else can read it next week.

>Take a child out for a burger or pizza would be considered spoiling them.

What country are you talking about? If you are talking about the US in the 1960's and 1970's, this is not correct at all. That era was the post-war Baby Boom, and the US was in prosperity mode, with plentiful housing and jobs. Returning soldiers started families, and tons of new entertainment opportunities exploded. Books, movies, records, TV, comics, amusement parks, Disneyland, etc. were ways that parents indulged their kiddos. So saying that in the 1960's and 1970's, your average parents were too cheap/stingy/harsh to take their kids out for a burger....? No way!

Source: I lived in those times. My cousins lived in those times. My friends and co-workers lived in those times and nobody had stories about "...my parents were so cheap that we couldn't go out for burgers or pizza." But I did hear stories about psycho nuns and rulers from the ones that went to Catholic school.

Yes. Poor children were especially hard hit because "they were a burden" on the community. Being an orphan meant you had no relatives to take care of you, which probably meant your parents had been "bad persons" (they still believed in "bad blood" back then, and if your father or mother was a thief or a liar, you would be, too, not because of example, but because "it ran in your blood").

Hello. Per rule 3.3, please post book recommendation requests in /r/SuggestMeABook or in our Weekly Recommendation Thread. Thank you.

I don't have many interesting stories like that, but the closest is probably when I was staying at a hostel in Germany years ago. A random stranger staying in the same room at the hostel gifted me a copy of Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality (which they had received from someone else in turn, read and enjoyed and wanted to pass it on). I'm not sure it would be as much my thing these days, but for where I was at mentally at the time I really ended up enjoying the book a lot.

I still have it and have wanted to pass it on to someone else in a similar context to keep the chain going, but haven't really found myself in a similar situation since. Maybe one day though! Maybe I'll put it in one of those Little Free Libraries with a note or something.

I fear the wayfarers series might potray AIs as too human-like, but it also explores how others would perceive them, how romantic relationships would work/be viewed, and the difficulties they experience trying to fit in.

Highly recommend! The second book does focus on these topics a bit more than the first though!

This is what I’ve found in many AI characters. They can be compelling, complex and interesting to read, but their motivations and behaviour always seems unmistakably human.

When I was a teen and still speaking to my spermdonor, I'd run out of books to read. We were about to go on a 4 hour car ride back to mum, he'd refused to let me stock up in the thrift store earlier, the divorce was going ugly - so out of spite I grabbed the biggest book from his personal shelf and shoved it into my backpack, without a look at the cover or description.
It was "The Swarm" by Frank Schätzing and it became my favourite book. He will never get it back, no matter that by now I own the ebook, the Hardcover and the new Limited Edition of the 20 year anniversary.

For those on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, London can be a grim place even today. It was seriously tough in the Victorian age. Exposing this hardship to the privileged literate class was one of Dickens’ motivations.

For me, nothing at all. Murderbot reads as an introvert who may not be neurotypical, but their motivations and actions are hardly alien.

Was working in a grocery store w a typical small book section next to the magazines. One day I found a strange bookmark on the floor w an ad for a book called "Severed". I dont recall the author's name, but I thought it was odd bc we didn't have any bookmarks on display, let alone ones w ads on them. A week later I found laying on a shelf a copy of that book. It wasn't in our sales system, which meant it had no reason to be in our store. I put a dollar sticker on it and bought it for shits n giggles, but then when I read it a major part of the main character's backstory is when he is in college: the same college I was currently attending, talking about classes in buildings that I was taking at that same moment. Odd all around

He also revised Oliver twist to cut out discribing faigin as the jew

Looks interesting - what gave the AI character a non-human feel for you?

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

>I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.

and

>You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back.

There are many, many more, but those are the ones that really stay in my head.

I just started All Systems Red, it’s good so far.

"All Systems Red" and the rest of the Murderbot Diaries.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/191900-the-murderbot-diaries

My family moved in 1983 when I was 12. My parents temporarily stacked their books on the attic stairs to be boxed up later. I was instructed not to read any until I was older. The following summer, the pile were still there, so I took one to read privately. Scared the beejesus out of me, but I couldn't talk to anyone about it without getting busted. It was the perfect age and time to read 1984

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

guess you gotta finish to find out

Also the technocore