From: Dipesh Navsaria <dipesh>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 20:32:26 -0500

I'm joining this one late (just finished moving from Champaign-Urbana to Madison), but...

I have to say that my "life changing book" was not in the youth/YA category: Thomas Hardy's _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ in 11th grade. For some reason, I fell in love with the book, and found it swept me along in a drama that no other book had really done before. While I was a kid who read voraciously, I never had the good fortune to find a teacher or librarian (or other adult, for that matter) who encouraged me to read beyond what I was comfortable with, so I had a steady diet of non-fiction and SF novels of the _Doctor Who_ vareity, for the most part.

_Tess_ taught me to love English Lit, and it led me to choose English Lit as my second major in college, a choice which ultimately saved me from complete and total academic frustration in the pre-med world. I still ended up in medicine, but, oddly enough, after a public health degree, physician assistant degree, and halfway through med school, I came back to a library school to learn more about children's lit.

The other book that was my source of solace and comfort in those dark days in college was John Milton's _Paradise Lost_. A portrait of Milton still hangs on my wall to this day. (Well, it would hang there if we had gotten around to hanging up stuff in the new house. :-)

So, not exactly what most may have been thinking of, but it goes to show that the traditionally "adult" genre can speak deeply to adolescents and change their lives in ways you just might not expect...even years down the road.

Peace and Prosperity, Dipesh

-<*>---------------------------------------<*>- Dipesh Navsaria, MPH, MS(LIS), MD Prospective Resident Physician Physician Assistant, Pediatrics Madison, Wisconsin, USA e-mail: dipesh at navsaria.com web/blog: http://www.navsaria.com
Received on Thu 01 Jun 2006 08:32:26 PM CDT