What made you want to read that?

My tastes are certainly eclectic. Anyone who knows me would agree with that, though there are certain topics I read nothing of--sports, for instance. What's exciting is coming across titles you had no knowledge of until the moment you find them at some sale or on a shelf at the library. I think there are a number of factors that draw people to a particular book, and the following is one example--I'll post more later.
When I was in high school--a small school in rural Michigan--the library there was in many ways the best in town, since it actually carried titles that would never have survived at the public library. I don't know if the latter carried a copy of Faulkner's "Light in August", but it was at the high school that I came across this book. I'm sure I barely knew who this writer was when I found it there, but the particular edition there undoubtedly had something to do with pulling me in. Sometime after Faulkner got the Nobel Prize his early and important works were reprinted in lovely re-issues by Random House, but these editions came with the assumption that readers were already astute enough to know what these books were about, or that at the least they shouldn't worry about such things since, after all, it's William Faulkner. Hence the inside flap for "Light" had absolutely no description of the plot, other than something to the effect that it was "Faulkner's seventh novel..." and was published in 1932. This intrigued me: what was it about? At that time I read a lot of science fiction, but this was probably not that. And what did the title mean? Sure there's light in August, just like there is the rest of the year. There was nothing to do but go to the first page and begin reading. A young woman is walking along the road....
That beginning was more than enough to suck me in, but I must admit it took me a long time--like about two years--to actually get to the end. I think the issue was simply that I had never read anything like this book, and so, not being quite up to snuff, I had to put it down for awhile before I could finish it, at which point I was in college. What I want to emphasize here is how it wasn't the content of the book but rather its physical quality--mysterious, "literary", before-my-time--that did it. It was only much later that I fully understood how great the book really was. If someone had said to me in 12th grade, "Would you like to read a book set in the South, about a white man obsessed with possibly having black blood, and these crazy characters in the town where he lives?", I would've been very uninterested. Please, give me Bradbury or Asimov instead.
This is the heart of browsing, and it has nothing to do with teachers or taste, but rather simple curiosity.