I suppose the title Reading The Great Gatsby in Tehran, or Reading Jane Austen in Tehran, is no where near as sexy as Reading Lolita in Tehran, but either certainly would've been more accurate.

Reading Lolita in Tehran had very little to do with the actual Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita. It was certainly incorporated in the book, right from the start even, but it was never the focal point of the book, or even one that was revisted throughout.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is an interesting novel overall, but I certainly wasn't impressed with the mislabeled title nor the writing style of author Azar Nafisi.

It is a difficult book to follow, particularly during conversational exchanges, since Nafisi doesn't generally use quotations. More often than not she writes the conversations in block paragraph form with every other sentence being from one person with the others from another.

This makes it difficult to follow, sometimes requiring retracing to make sure it was read properly.

What the book was successful in doing though was increasing my interest in Iran, and traveling there some day.

I'm someone that's interested in going anywhere and everywhere. And that anywhere and everywhere would certainly include Iran.

I believe that there's always something of interest that we can all learn from in any country in the world...even Iran. I find the current political isolation it's receiving quite interesting, and this why I initially picked up this book.

I wanted to learn more about what life in Iran was like and whether it was some place I'd actually like to visit someday. Reading Lolita in Tehran satisfied my hunger for that information, painting a brutal society, especially for women, while also showing me that it's a place unlike any I've ever seen.

Now, I'm not going to be running out and booking a flight this moment, but someday maybe it'd be possible for Americans to more easily travel to Iran and see what this faraway country is all about.

But, back in regards to Reading Lolita in Tehran, I was overall disappointed with the novel and the writing style of Nafisi. It was difficult to follow at times, had very little to do with Lolita, as the title would suggest, and is really requires one to be extremely well read in order to enjoy it completely.

I have been told by others they believe me to be well read, and a bit of a bookie, but Nafisi discusses so many books that it pulled away from the enjoyment of this one for me since I had not read all of them. And for the ones I had read, other than Lolita, it had been several years so I was certainly not recalling many of the details of them.

I guess it was a poor assumption on my part that Reading Lolita in Tehran would be specifically about that, reading Lolita in Tehran, but I nonetheless picked up that novel first to give it a read through before I read this one.

Unfortunately one didn't really have as large of an involvement in the other as the titles would suggest. Lolita was still an incredibly interesting novel, that I got some crap over reading due to it's content, and it greatly overshadowed Nafisi's attempt.

Generally though, I would say Reading Lolita in Tehran is a good book, but just not one for most. If you're going to do it, make sure you're already quite well read in the classics, like Nabokov, Pnin, Austen, Fitzgerald, and so on, or that you have time to get into all of those novels before jumping into this book.

Had I known that more of a background was required, I would've gone in depth further, but instead I find myself rather disappointed. I certainly ended up falling on the side of the line where it's not for most.

It wasn't for me, and it hasn't been for others that told me they put it down less than 100 pages in because they didn't like it, but it might be for you if you're a bookie and call follow the several nuances of the book.