For what it's worth, the following three stories/novels have that effect on me. There's something about them that seems surreal and foreign, a little magical.

- The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

- Erewhon, Samuel Butler

- The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

The styles and formats are completely different. The only common thing I can think of is that there's this invisible guiding force in all of them, whether it's good or bad. The Machine Stops is a dystopia about technology in absence of a soulful humanity. Erewhon is wild. Truly wild. It has to be a genre all its own, something akin to Darwinian technopunk. The Alchemist is probably one of those novels you could riff on with a yoga instructor and have a good conversation :joy:. It's classical magical surrealism, but it's a good story about a person's lifetime journey. Nothing deep, but it's wholesome.

Edit: also will add A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr., and Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.