From January to March 2004 a group of us on WomenWritersThroughtheAges@Yahoo.com read and wrote to one another about Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran: A Memoir in Books. Although I had not been that enthusiastic and during the first read was inclined to be more adversarially critical of Nafisi than sympathetic, the book grew on me, and eventually I assigned and read it with three different classes at GMU (where I teach) in the following year. I thus made up a series of lectures and I also posted to the list about the experience of teaching this book to students. In March 2005 Nafisi herself came to give a lecture at GMU and I wrote about this too (on my blog) and on list again.
I had planned to put all the postings from this reading and discussion on my website. I never found the time. As I write this, I have now assigned Nafisi's book five times and read Things I've Been Silent About too. So I have put here three fully-considered lectures in the form of Reverie blogs. I put together all the postings we had and made them into two coherent discourses. To this I added my meditation on Things I've Been Silent About. I also include two worth while critical essays from periodicals for those who have access to JStor.