This book is a must read for all those who love modern classic literature and who are interested on what happened in Iran during the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80s. I was in college that time and I have been hearing and reading bits of news about that war. This book completed that story particularly its impact on the ordinary people particularly on its main characters.Azar Nafisi, a lady author, effectively related her favorite modern fiction works (Lolita of Nabokov, Gatsby of Fitzgerald, Daisy Miller of Henry James and Pride and Prejudice of Jane Austen) in this tumultuous era of Iran's rich history. Lolita was used as the back draft for the reading group's introduction of the women characters and how the Lolita's rape could be compared to the discrimination (symbolizes by the wearing of veil) that women in Iran suffered from its own laws. The trial of Gatsby built the climax of the story by providing the contrast between the belief of the Nafisi's male characters with their counterparts in THE GREAT GATSBY. The Iran-Iraq war happened at the height of the plot's climax interwined with the Henry James' novels particularly Daisy Miller. Here the female characters suffered the most but they chose to be brave, just like Daisy. Finally, the most interesting contrast was provided by Jane Austen's novels and the end of the war. Interesting because Austen's English novels were described by Nafisi as like a big dance which for me takes a genius to relate it to a war-torn Moslem country after about a decade of war.I have read most of the novels mentioned except the third part: James. This is the reason why I almost enjoyed reading all the pages of the book as I knew what Nafisi was trying to say through the characters she borrowed from the literary greats (Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen). There are equally great other books and authors and this just proves that Nafisi knows her stuff. I have never encountered this writing style before so I am giving this book a five star rating.

I'm not sure I can finish this book. It's just so boring and self-important. And poorly written. My eyes keep crossing. It makes me angry because I think this COULD really be a good book. It has a good premise, a lot of potential, and it's about a topic I'm actually very interested in and would like to know more about. But instead it's dry as hell and doesn't follow any cohesive pattern--it just feels like a lot of random moments in the life of Azar Nafisi strung together by some run-of-the-mill literary criticism. And maybe worst of all, it doesn't make me feel any more empathetic to the Iranian people than I already did and it doesn't give me any additional insight into Islamic culture that I haven't already gotten from Western media sources.Why did this get such good reviews? Do people never read books and judge them for themselves? Or do they just say what they think they're supposed to say because they were told this is a terribly important book about a terribly important topic by a terribly important person? *sigh*

I read this book while I was down with the flu, which added a dimention to my reading as I was isolated in my room for a couple of days. I read some of the reviews for this book on Good Reads and I must say my experience of this book is quite different from what some other people have reported. Azar's opening two chapters were enough to suck me into her world and engross me. Her reading of Lolita was wonderful and I like the way she able to bring her reading of this book, her reflections on Humbolt into the context of her own experiences in Tehran. One of the criticisms of this book that I read on Good Reads is that her reading material is too western centric - i.e. that she gives too much praise to the literature of America and therefore might give the American reader the impression that their lit is 'better' than Islamic or Iranian literature. I didn't read her book choices in this way. In a way, because America became such a central focus of hatred for the regime in Iran during the revolution she picked this material to demonstrate how biased and myopic this focus was, and how it failed to see the complexity of American life - i.e. that books like Lolita or the Great Gatsby were not recieved with one interpretation in America and that many of the criticisms leveled at those books in the Iranian context were also been discussed in America - i.e. that they were immoral or had flawed heros.She talks quite considerably about the difficulty of becoming as she calls it 'irrelevant' in her own country. She describes the constant scrutiny that women get on the streets if they are seen to be too alluring or if they wear 'pink socks' or let their nails grow or have a strand of hair fall out from under her head covering. I was thinking of this in the light of my own 'Australian' context. Obviously my life is not as restricted in terms of what I wear or how I choose to adorn or comport myself in public. In fact, these choices are fairly banal and mundane. Yet, for Azar this restriction caused her to examine aspects of herself and her society to work out what really mattered. Because the system made socks important, choosing to wear pink or striped socks became a subversive act. Beyond the immediate existential questions of how an individual is able to deal with having their public and private lives so micro managed, I also enjoyed her questioning of the effects of these policies on society as a whole and especially her understanding of the role of literature in allowing a person to understand complexity in life as a whole.I must say, when I read her passage about the 'trial' of the novel 'the great Gatsby' in her class, I experienced a different book than I had read. She managed to inject me with a wonderful sense of excitement and a desire to reread Gatsby with new eyes.