I read this book shortly after finishing _Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran_ by Danny Postel. Reading Legitimation Crisis is a spirited work dealing with recent trends in Iranian philosophy and political theory and philosophy in the west. It was named after Nafisi's best selling _Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books_ which I picked up shortly after finishing Postel's collection of essays.

Reading Lolita is an easy and beautifully written narrative. It is a memoir not only of books but also of friendship and struggle in post-revolutionary Iran. Nafisi's personal story speaks of her life in Tehran as entwined and adorned with and through the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen (to name a few). It is a memoir about reading, family, and friends as well as being a commentary on political, religious, and social life. Any reader of the novelists discussed will likely find Nafisi's memoir to be of great interest.

In the introductory pages of her memoir, Nafisi writes: "Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when shot periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown" (9). This is followed by a discussion of Nabokov's _Invitation to a Beheading_, a novel depicting a totalitarian regime where people live in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. "Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected" (23).

As has often been remarked as is not difficult to anticipate, the women in Nafisi's reading group make these novels their own by reading them through their everyday experiences. As a western reader, this offers new and fresh insight into these canonical texts.

In addition to creating a number of portraits of well known novels, allowing us to see and read these works with new eyes, Nafisi is also able to convey how the world of literature allows us to imaginatively create private worlds protecting us from the nightmarish qualities of a public realm that is difficult to endure: the fundamentalist regime, the periodic detainments and harassments by roving bands of teenage morality police, the war with Iraq, the veil and gender apartheid, anti-intellectualism . . . This private realm is identified as a second world, a place of fantasy, that is in part created when her reading group comes together.

While there are dozens of entry points into this memoir, one particular aspect of Nafisi's reflections that stood out to me was her case for the democratic quality of novels. Insofar as the novel preserves and carries multiple voices and a plurality of perspectives, readers will inevitably find themselves engaged in imaginary acts of reciprocity. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why people burn or ban books: literature challenges us to think outside of ourselves, forcing us to confront different perspectives, both savory and unsavory. This de-centering of the self is a learning process. As Nafisi observes, novels sometimes contradict our cherished expectations and in this respect are often difficult to read.

For instance, using The Great Gatsby in a class on American literature at the University of Allameh Tabatabai, Nafisi shows us that the novel cannot be understood without accepting a degree of ambiguity. It is the ambiguity of novels and their indecision about right and wrong that gives them their democratic strength and vitality. That novels refrain from clichéd moralism is often an anathema to religious orthodoxies, as demonstrated time and time again by militant students who openly challenged the use of Gatsby in the classes she was teaching.

All in all this is a fascinating autobiographical account written by an intellectual who is deeply in love with literature.

I loved this book and had a hard time putting it down.

I think it showed the side of Islam that the media does not share, that there are innocent people that believe in good that are being extorted by evil on a grand scale. Everyone should read this book and allow themselves to see the other side of the coin.

Nafisi did such a good job of comparing the great western novels to her society that it provoked me to make a list of books mentioned and start to read them as well. I am now reading both the Great Gatsby and Lolita.

I'm so glad that she wrote this novel and even more glad that I've read it.

I wanted to like this book but I couldn't. She often takes a long time to get to a point and I found it such a burden to get through. She write in great detail about all the books and if you've never read Lolita or the Great Gatsby or Daisy Miller, etc.- BEWARE. I felt she was writing and giving us a dissertation on the work. It's long, often pretentious, boring and seemed never ending. Parts of what she writes about on life in Iran during the revolution were interesting but not enough to keep the book going for me.

This book was amazing. I could not put it down. This book is a must read for anyone studying womens issues or studying western literature.