Rating: 
Summary: Experiences of a Persian girl
Review: Before I start, I should say that Dr.Nafisi is a great writer with wonderful skills. However, what she writes is not necessarily true. I lived in Iran for 18 years and I moved to the US recently. I found her story completely untrue. she lived in tehran, the capital, just like me. and the year she decided to teach "western literature" to her seven female students was 1995 meaning that Iran was pretty much modern.
I read all these literature books that she mentioned in my classes in high school. Neither I nor my professors had any problem with teaching the books. moreover they were not scared of the government as she describes this "too risky". I just want people to read such books with an open-mind and do not believe everything that they read or here.
Rating: 
Summary: Sex with a man you loathe. . .
Review: Reading the reviews and the dust jacket, you can get the idea that this is a book about a book club. For this reader, it is more directly about the impact of the Islamic revolution on the lives of educated women in Iran. There women are required at the risk of their lives to wear the "veil," which symbolizes the surrender of their independence to a government that uses fear and intimidation to control them and, in the words of the author, make them "irrelevant."The author, now living in the US, tells of almost two decades in Iran, as a teacher of English and American literature. She tells of the great hopes for reform after the fall of the Shah and the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and with her we watch in horror as the revolution takes Iran by force instead into its medieval past. There are arrests, murders, and executions and those who can, flee to the West. The transformation of Iran is charted by the repressive attempts to make women invisible, by covering them in public from head to toe. It becomes a world in which wearing fingernail polish, even under gloves, is a punishable offense. And punishment, as we learn, is typically brutal. The author escapes from this violence into the imaginative world of Western novels (from Nabokov to Dashiell Hammet) where she finds democratic ideals expressed in fiction's ability to help us empathize with other people. For her, it is the heart that has gone out of the gun-wielding moral police that want to sweep away all but complete submission to their fundamentalist form of Islam. And while she is a teacher, she must deal with classes filled with students who have been polarized by the political forces around them. All, curiously, are in single agreement that the West is corrupt and absolutely evil. Meanwhile, the novels of Western writers engage them, sometimes furiously. A wonderful sequence in the book concerns a mock trial in the classroom in which "The Great Gatsby" is brought up on charges of immorality. "Lolita," we discover, becomes a story of a girl who finally escapes from the clutches of a man who wants to erase who she is and turn her into a figment of his imagination. It's not an allegory of Iran, Nafisi insists, but it's hard not to see the parallels. The contamination of personal relationships between men and women and its impact on love and marriage inform their readings of James and Austen. Meanwhile, even as her classes meet to argue the merits of these authors, their books are disappearing as one bookstore after another is closed down. Added to all this is an account of living through eight years of war with Iraq, while missiles fall on Tehran and the numbers of casualties on the front lines mount. After leaving teaching, the author assembles a hand-picked group of former students, all female, to meet weekly at her home and talk more about books. Here the individual personalities and histories of each come to the fore, and we get a glimpse (as in fiction) into personal worlds experienced intensely under circumstances that have nearly robbed them of their identities. It's easy to go on and on about this book. There is so much packed into it. Needless to say, I recommend it highly, especially to anyone who loves books or has taught literature. Obviously, it also informs many gender issues. For male readers, such as myself, it is like an extended version of Virginia Woolf's illuminating "A Room of One's Own." The author and her young students show how the lives of both men and women are impoverished in a world where one sex attempts to assume control over the other. For me, the book is best summed up in the author's words near the end: "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe." The books is not a polemic, and as the author would be first to admit, there are many other voices to be heard on the subject of Iran, its government, and its role in the world. For this reader, her book opens a door into a complex subject that invites one to read more and know more.
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable, Insightful Read
Review: Nafisi does a nice job of taking the reader into the lives of women forced to live under Islamic rule in Iran. Anyone interested in the struggle for gender equality or a better understanding of the life lived by many Iranian women should enjoy this book. Perhaps it strays a little too far from the theme of forbidden Western literature into the relationships between a professor and her students but if one understands that the examples of illegal novels serve as a fine, albeit small, example of oppression then the book's purpose is well served.
Rating:
Summary: Not your average book club
Review: Talk about a zinger of a book club! The genesis of Reading Lolita in Tehran is a book club gathered into the home of Asar Nafisi, after she was expelled from university for refusing hijab. Many of the young women participating in the book club have also suffered under the repressive regime, some in jail, others in 'family cloisters,' although an interesting minority are religiously conservative. Through this extraordinary group of women who gathered to discuss forbidden works of Western literature, we learn about the lives of women in Iran and how exposure to literature can lead to rebirth.
A book that defies genre, refuses to be categorized, Reading Lolita works as literature, memoir, history, anthropology, and philosophy. Highest recommendation for this beautiful and thought-provoking meld of life with literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Apparently, those who can't write . . .
Review: write books about those who can. This book is absolutely unreadable. If you truly have a love of literature, skip this dross and head straight for Nabokov. If you've already read Nabokov, read him again.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I've read in a LONG time - an award winner!
Review: "I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions." (338-339) Growing up as an American in a family of educators who have always encouraged creativity, I have always taken "free access to imagination" for granted. Although I am fully aware that America has not always practiced what is preached in terms of granting personal liberties, I have always felt confident that my freedoms would be protected by the U.S. Constitution. Reading Dr. Nafisi's thought-provoking memoir has reminded me of the fragility of such freedoms and how ruthless oppression is not just something to be read about in history books. This brilliant piece of non-fiction appealed to me on so many levels. As an avid reader and a life-long student of literature, for instance, I was intrigued by the way Nafisi intermingled the literature of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen into her discussion of her life as a woman and a professor of western lit in the pre-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran. Not only does she demonstrate how life often imitates art, she also discusses how literature expands one's perception of reality. My reality was certainly expanded when I read discussions of such important topics as censorship, fundamentalism, and human rights. It didn't matter that of all the literary works discussed, Gatsby is the only one I've read - the author made me feel totally comfortable with her synopses of the works of Nabokov, James and Austen...and now I would like to thank her for expanding my personal reading list! Although I have not yet read Nabokov, James or Austen, I couldn't help drawing on my own reading experiences. As I think about how Iranian women were made "irrelevant" when they were stripped of their status and forced to wear the veil, I remember "A Handmaid's Tale", written by Margaret Atwood, a novel in which women are also stripped of their status when they are relegated to the roles of babymakers for the infertile wives of the Commanders in the Republic of Gilead. Like the Iranian women, the handmaids are forced to wear identical shroud-like garments in an attempt to strip women of their individuality. The Republic of Gilead is reminiscent of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as many other totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes in that the strict implementation of revolutionary ideologies led to a dystopian environment where personal happiness is virtually non-existent. Dr. Nafisi's discussion of censorship, the elimination of the intellectual elite and the overall mentality in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, on the other hand, brings me back to the world of Guy Montag in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451". Bradbury created a fictional society where censorship was the rule. Firemen burned books while the media controlled the minds of the populace. Without free access to the written word, intellectual thought and imagination could not develop freely in either Bradbury's fictional world or in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Brilliantly written memoir that is had to put down once started. Fantastically done book. Highly recommended. I am a memoir/Non Fiction reader and this book ranks up there with some of the best memoirs/autobiographies I have read, namely 'Nightmares Echo', 'A Child Called It', 'Running With Scissors' and 'Lucky'. Read This Book!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't know what everyone is raving about...
Review: The author must have used every 3+ syllable word in her vocabulary. No, it's not that I couldn't understand her, it was just pretentious and hollow. Come on, taking a whole paragraph to describe getting out of the shower?!? I could have done without all the flowery language and it would have been a better book. It dragged a lot in some places, too. I think if she left out all the inane descriptions and exaggerated language, it would have been about 50 pages shorter. Her intentions were good. The stories to tell were interesting but her style of writing was too phony.
Rating: 
Summary: just superb
Review: An amazing peek "behind the veil" of the lives of women in Iran. The ordinary college travails an American woman goes through pale beside the ordeals these characters must endure. The discussions of the books - classics by Nabokov, Austen and others - made me decide to read some of the ones I had missed during my own college period, certainly a sign the book made a deep impression. And the ordinary details of everyday living were rendered so sharply, I could almost taste the ice cream with cold coffee poured over it and see the various pompous men who had the power to make these women's lives miserable simply by being born into the right sex. Considering a woman can be punished by simply showing a few tendrils of hair, you can imagine what happens when they dare to do slightly more subversive things, such as break up with a boyfriend, take a radical position as a university teacher - or write a book like this one. Luckily, it made it to publication, in a way a small miracle.
Rating:
Summary: The Passionate Bibliophile Will Relish this Book!
Review: Nafisi has written not an autobiography, but a story of her love affair with certain books and authors. She divides her life into four important phases, and the four books or authors that influenced her during that time in her life. It is a mix of personal memories, important moments in Iranian history, what she was reading at the time and how it colored her impressions. She begins with what would be the next-to-the-last sequentially, the start of her home class and the reading of Lolita. That Nafisi is an excellent literature professor shines through from the beginning. She doesn't merely mention the books, she discusses them, as though with a class, discussing plot, characters, details, meaning. I, who had never been interested in Lolita or Nabokov, became convinced of his worth solely due to her enthusiasm and passion for his works. She follows with the Iranian revolution and the subsequent "trial" of Gatsby in her classroom. Henry James accompanies the times following the revolution, the war with Iraq, her feelings of uselessness and her return to teaching. She ends with Jane Austen, more about her home class, how she ended up in America and where all her "girls" are now. Though this could have easily been a depressing book, about life in Iran, it is not. Instead, Nafisi has written about the beauty and hope of the novel, how it affected her and how she wanted it to affect her students. Nafisi is a kindred spirit to all us ardent bibliophiles. She expresses in words the passion, exhilaration and transfiguration I often feel during and after reading a novel and has lit a fire in me to re-read several classics she mentioned. This is definitely a five star book!
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