The experience of reading a book that was written for someone in a situation you're currently in is qualitatively different from reading a book that was written for a situation you've imagined. The book that finds you is a different object from the book you found.

I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking during a period of grief and it was a completely different experience from the reading I had of it before. The book's subject — the disorientation of bereavement, the way grief works by undermining rationality — was not abstract. It was descriptive. It named something I was experiencing.

This is not what I mean when I recommend a book to someone. You can't recommend an experience like that; you can only hope the book finds them when they need it.