CBR17 Book 61: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography

CBR17 Pie Chart: Education

CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens)

Official summary:

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

I got this in an e-book sale during the summer of 2018, because it sounded interesting and like something I should own. It fit in a number of my reading challenges this year, so I decided to read it this summer. Unfortunately, while some of the stories Nafisi told about the increasing totalitarianism that was introduced in her country were really interesting, the actual literary analysis was rather boring, and even the historical events got a bit dry after a while.

This book is a mix between a biography, writing about Nafisi’s life in Iran as it became subject to an increasingly more authoritarian government. One of the reasons I had trouble sticking with it was that, sadly, the news cycle was so depressing and so much in the real world America was mirroring things I was reading about that it was distressing to read. With the world being the way it is at the moment, escapist reading is becoming more and more essential for my mental health. 

So I have to confess that while I didn't DNF this book, I also didn't manage to read all of it. I ended up skipping probably about half, reading the first few sections, then skipping to the last one, to see how everything ended. I also think it’s important to mention that while this book wasn’t really for me, it may be a better fit for someone else. It does feature a lot of literary analysis, though, mostly of books I have neither read nor have any interest in ever reading, so I should possibly have researched it more closely before I started it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read