Summer Reading Binge

So, some time around late June or early July I usually start a summer reading binge where I pretty much read anything I can get my hands on that I won't have the pleasure of reading when school rolls around. For my birthday I decided to buy a few books for the Friends of Jefferson Parish Library which has a non-profit store located at East Bank Regional. One of the books, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, has been the highlight of my summer! If you have any interest in early 20th century world literature and even just early 20th c. American literature, you can't possibly overlook this book. Nafisi somehow manages to present the reader with a deep, intricate analysis of writings by Nabokov, Henry James, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, while relating and contrasting the themes of the novels to the joys and sorrows of those who experienced or participated in the Iranian Revolution of the 1980's. By the end of the book, I felt like I had also become one of the Nafisi's own beloved students -- that I had been imparted some kind of deep, secret knowledge about humanity, literature, and the relation between the two. The last time I read something of this personal magnitude was last semester when I was doing research for a Chaucer paper and decided to read The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. So amazing! I feel like Nafisi's memoir also gave me a greater appreciation for Rumi, a muslim Sufi poet of the Medieval period with whom I fell in love with back in my 2009 reading binge. I think it was also the mind blowing analysis of Pride and Prejudice by Nafisi that prompted me to finally read the copy of Persuasion I managed to get from Borders before it went out of business. I think I will save my discussion of Persuasion for another time though, since I have a lot to say on that subject as well. For now, I'm going to start compiling a reading list of things I may or may not read next =).