Reading Lolita

More than a year ago I bought a very interesting book. For some reason I didn’t read it. It sounded interesting, but heavy. Filled with intertextual references which I thought I should read first, or later. All so very tiring. However, lately I got sick with all the fluffy teenage sci-fi I’ve been reading. The latest book ‘the water wars’ was the last straw. Sure, it is entertaining, but you can’t read these kinds of books all the time. Intellectually I need to be stimulated as well. Finally I took this high-brow book of the shelves and actually started reading for a couple of hour straight. The book is called "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and is about a group of students forming a kind of book club reading all kinds of banned books. It’s a memoir based on actual fact. These girls read Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Austen etc. and discuss these books and relate them to their controlled and locked-in lives under the Iranian regime. So far I like it tremendously. How literature can be used to escape from reality, but also how it feeds back to reality. I’m looking forward to tomorrow to read the next chapter.