Suggested Reading from Reading Lolita in Tehran

At the end of Reading Lolita in Tehran, there is a list (yea!) of suggested reading. As always, I read the italicized books.

    

    Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi

    The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

    Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

    The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow

    Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

    Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

    Shamela and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

    The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

    The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

    The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square by Henry James

    In the Penal Colony and The Trial by Franz Kafka

    The Confidence Man by Herman Melville

    Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

    The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

    My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad

    The Language Police by Diane Ravitch

    The Net of Dreams by Julie Salamon

    Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

    A Thousand and One Nights by Scheherazade

    The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

    The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

    The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky

    Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

    Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

    Address Unknown by Katherine Kressman Taylor

    A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe by Anne Tyler

    Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Hero

He is a hero because he refuses to become like all the rest.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Breathe

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter the world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Monster

"Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Secret

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his reader to feel in the art of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Stranger

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi

Empathy

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic -- not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels -- the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafsi