Reading and Writing

Hi all
I've been reading a lot over the last day or so. I'm reading a book called "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books." It's very interesting, about a female university professor in Tehran during their cultural revolution as they became the Islamic Republic of Iran. She relates the lessons of the classic literature that she reads to what is going on around her.

I began reading it because I wanted to experience a memoir as a reader, because the memoir I'm working on of my own is lagging a bit. I needed to hear another memoir voice, you might say, to compare what I'm doing and what other people have done. I started writing this memoir, as you may recall, during Nanowrimo... well, it's still a work in progress!

"Reading Lolita" is slightly above me intellectually. Part of the problem is that I didn't follow the details of the political issues at the time, so it's somewhat new to me; and also, she is discussing specific classic literature that I haven't read or that I've read too long ago. So I suppose that the next thing I have to do is find all the books she refers to and read them, and then read the book again!

And meanwhile, my own memoir sounds... well, less literary than hers, but pretty true to my own voice. I still have a lot of work to do on it, but it's going quite well!