I picked up Reading Lolita in Tehran several years after hearing professor Nafisi in an NPR interview. I found her perspective on living through the Iranian Revolution very intriguing. Dr. Nafisi was and is a professor of English Literature. Her life revolved about searching for meaning in books, and finding universal truths presented in fiction. She totally dorks out about Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen, and many others. The title was chosen partly for its implicit shock value and partly because it's an area of her expertise. The author's first book was a scholarly tome on Nabokov. We read books through the lens of our own lives. Reading Lolita is more about Azar's relationships with her students than the Iranian Revolution itself, though the latter certainly casts a shadow across every aspect of their lives. And at the end there is some question if they've begun to blame all of life's problems on the Revolution. But I would hear about someone being arrested for failing to uphold "God's Law", and all I could think about were religious zealots in America wanting to implement the same thing. At the core, Christianity is just Islam with a different sequel. These thoughts clouded my ability to appreciate some subtleties in the story. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a book about the struggle of personalities to express themselves under the heavy hand of dictatorship.