A review by courtneyem
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

1.0

This book was absolutely terrible. The first thing I noticed that I hated, was her overly ornate, pretentious writing style, which never let up. Then she uses that same cloying writing style to go off on literary analyses of obscure books that no one has ever read. When she started in on political rants about badly explained political factions of Iran (is she assuming we all know Iran's political history by heart?), I knew I was done. I gave it 100 pages and I had to stop. And I don't even want to know how many times she snuck in the phrase "reading Lolita in Tehran" in those 100 pages. It was like every other page! "And that's what happened in the months that we were reading Lolita in Tehran;" "During the time that we were reading Lolita in Tehran..." We get it. The parts of the book that I thought were interesting was hearing about day-to-day life in Iran, but there wasn't enough of that to keep me there. I rarely don't finish a book; I am good at slogging through even the most difficult book. But this one, I could not take.