For me its hands down the movie Freaks. I saw it as a college senior and was floored by this extraordinary tale that is at once shocking and tender. It inspired my annual party, The Gobbler, during which we pay tribute to Tod Browning's creation, his curious cast of characters, and recreate the wedding banquet toast. This year we'll be staging the 40th annual fiasco.

Kristin Lavransdatter, 3-volume saga by Sigrid Undset, helped this Minnesota-born Norwegian-American better understand his family and himself....

The book is Jane Eyre. I read it in 1977 as an overconfident but underprepared Ivy League freshman in a class taught by a grad student from England. After grudgingly admitting the guy taught me something, but earning only a B in the course, I went forward in my life with a continued love of reading novels ( even some 19th C. English ones) , and onto a career in health care. 27 years later, I was providing health care in a patient's home when the film of Jane Eyre came on my patient's TV. As I was working with her, I blurted out pieces of what I thought were pithy literary analysis about the story. It didn't take me long to recognize that everything I'd said came directly out of the mouth of that skinny English guy with the wild hair and baggy sweaters. I realized two things: that I had to read the book again and that I had to thank him for teaching me how to read novels. Internet searching turned up nobody who could be him, so I resorted to the alumni directory, found an address and sent a Christmas card. Months later I got a reply. The grad student writing a dissertation on music in Elizabethan literature became an airline pilot, and, after two years of desultory e-mail correspondence, my one true love. Another book we read in his class was Jane Austens' Persuasion, which we find to be mildly prophetic.