Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

Literature matters. I could argue for hours about the importance of stories and the transformative powers of words. But whatever I say pales in comparison to the experience of people like Azar Nafisi, who lived in Iran for 18 years during a time when literature was a matter of life and death. Her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, covers Nafisi's life from the late 1970s to 1997, when she left Tehran for the United States. During those decades, Nafisi taught at several universities and was expelled from two before creating a secret literature class for women. Reading Lolita in Tehran is also about the trials of being female in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where improperly wearing the veil can get you beaten in the streets...

Read the rest of my review at Summer Reading Project.