i'm a very very complex person

After much hemming and hawing, kicking and screaming, etc, I am now reading Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. I'm about a quarter of the way through it, and thus far it seems that my resistance was justified. I don't know. The intense prejudice I had against this book before I even started it is the sort of thing that can easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy, so it's a little bit hard to determine if my dislike of the book is genuine or if I've just set myself up to hate it. Whatever the reason, I'm not enjoying it much. Nafisi's prose style is annoying--it's exactly what one would expect of someone used to doing academic writing who is suddenly and self-consciously trying to be literary. Of course, I've never read any of Nafisi's academic writing so I don't know what her style is like in that context, but in this book she allows herself to indulge in too many of her 'writerly' impulses and the result is clumsy and overwritten. I also think her sections are too short and her structure too jumpy. There's too much about her, and not enough about the women she taught, the books they read, and the group's reactions to those books. Bleh. Not impressed.

I'm going to try to finish it, but that's a lot of slogging before the book club meeting on Sunday.