Thoughts after finishing Reading Lolita in Tehran:

- I'm grateful for every single opportunity I've had to study literature -- formal, informal, in a group, by myself. My education in literature is very incomplete and scattered at best, but it's funny how I'll remember things from my British lit class in college, a word or phrase from a John Donne meditation or Shakespeare sonnet a professor went over nearly 10 years ago. Or how much I miss my grad school reading group, all of us holding our copies of Neruda poems or Bukowski short stories or novels by Nabokov or Cather or Lawrence, sitting in a circle of chairs at Starbucks, the analysis preceded and followed by a good measure of gossip and random thoughts on life. A class or a reading group can change who you are. Not overnight, but more like how waves shape the sea shore. I know this firsthand.

- I have my complaints about the United States but I should thank God every day I was born here and not Iran. "I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination" is what Nafisi wrote in her notebook the day before she left Iran. Something not to be taken for granted.

- I regret not having read Daisy Miller and having merely skimmed The Great Gatsby.

- You should read this book. Seriously.