For almost two decades, Azar Nafisi has been writing about the intersection of her experiences in Iran and her interest in Western literature. Her most popular book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is an account of teaching Iranian female students during the last two decades of the twentieth century. She immigrated to the United States in 1997, writing additional books exploring how literature can open up in new ways when it is read cross-culturally—and also about how books have provided her, as she says, with “new eyes with which to see both my homeland and my adopted country.”

In her newest work, Read Dangerously, Nafisi finds herself in an unexpected situation: “I never imagined that I would experience [the] same feeling of fear and helplessness living in the United States as I did in Iran under the Islamic Republic.” Literature has become endangered in both places, but for different reasons. “In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them,” the author explains. “The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence.”

Her book hits the shelves at a moment even more timely than she might have anticipated when she planned her book. American news is now full of headlines describing efforts to ban and even burn books all across the nation. Nafisi suggests that a cultural avoidance of pain is at the root. Although she seems to be referring to the practice of listing trigger warnings designed to shield students “from the bitterness of truth,” the criticism of so-called “critical race theory” is often predicated on a supposed desire to shield white students from feeling shame when learning about white supremacy. Too often, “we don’t want to be disturbed.”

Reading, she explains, is exactly the disturbance we need. What we learn from literature is a deep sense of shared humanity. Tyrants dehumanize the people they seek to oppress. At the same time, they try to create themselves as something more than human. Great literature does the opposite: it restores the dignity of humanity to the oppressed, and the fallibility of humanity to the oppressor.

Nafisi structures her book as a series of letters to her father written over the months between the fall of 2019 when protests spread throughout Iran and the summer of 2020 as events from the pandemic to Black Lives Matter activism shook the United States out of its complacency.

Each letter discusses a set of authors who confront issues of justice and injustice in different ways. Nafisi’s chapter on war highlights how David Grossman, Elliot Ackerman, and Elias Khouri create complex and nuanced characters on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In another chapter, she explores differing responses to race and gender oppression by characters in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. When looking at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale, Nafisi considers how fiction exposes the ways totalitarian states use concepts of modesty to silence women and religious dissenters. Her most successful chapter explains how James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates make us consider when rage draws lines between us and how to work beyond those divisions.

Unfortunately, Nafisi’s decision to write her book as if each chapter is a letter to her father is unsuccessful. She addresses her beloved Baba, dead for more than a decade, repeatedly in ways that are distracting and feel false. Countless times in the book, when she has information to impart to the reader, she begins her description with phrases like “Baba jan, I draw your attention to the fact that…” or “You must remember that…”—phrases that become more and more annoying as the book goes along.

Sometimes Nafisi jumps through hoops to explain something that happened after her father died: “You and I have had no discussions on virtual reality, which became so pervasive after your death.” Other times she has to explain something to her readers which her father would have been well acquainted—such as his own writing. “I don’t want to quote you to yourself,” she writes in the letter, but she then does exactly that for paragraph after paragraph.

She tells us every time she refills her coffee cup, perhaps to lend her prose the chatty feel of a casual letter about books, rather than the more formal style of literary analysis. But instead, her repetition steals the reader’s attention from the actual ideas about which she writes.

Read Dangerously would have been far more successful if Nafisi talked not to but about her father, a choice which would have allowed her to talk more comfortably about how his commitment to justice and resistance, as well as his love of literature and learning, both of which inspired her so deeply. And in that sense, the book as a whole is indeed a beautiful love letter to her father, the man who taught her to read dangerously and to respond to the world with a deep and abiding sense of connection and hope.

Book banning is on the rise according to the American Library Association. New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi's new book, Read Dangerously, is an antidote to these turbulent times. As a lecturer and Fellow for Johns Hopkins University, she informs us on how best to use literature to combat hate. Written as a series of letters to her dead father, she uses literature to map out the troubles in the world. By reading, we arm ourselves with imagination. One of the few tools that can defeat fascism.

She writes five letters between 2017 and 2020. She discusses the death threats Salman Rushdie received for writing The Satanic Verses. She points out how fast his book was targeted. She further elaborates on how so many other books are targeted for banning even though they do not even remotely criticize a government or group. She takes a moment to point out how little this happens in the United States which turns out to be ironic considering what’s happening now in this country. Banning books is an early sign of a fascist state. She also includes Fahrenheit 451 in this section. The governments need to attack ideas, criticism, different ideas, and imagination itself.

The second letter references Hurston and the need for dignity. The need to participate in society as you are and not to sacrifice your identity for an opportunity. The third letter focuses on writers who write about war. How one side will try to dehumanize the other to make it easier to kill them, but getting to know them is to get closer to peace. The fourth letter discusses Atwood and her book The Handmaid’s Tale. She points out how eerily similar the events in the book follow events in Iran after 1979. Even though the book has sci-fi elements, Atwood points out there is a historical element to each part, something that has already happened.

The general theme circles back around the power of imagination. A fascist government wants you to worry about your survival or how you may be targeted. They want you to focus on how things could be worse, be lucky they are not. However, imagination gives us hope. We can imagine a better world, make fun of those who would oppress us, and point out how there is no message or power behind the hate. Imagination tells us that things can be a whole lot better and to fight for that better future.

Favorite Passages

Introduction
In Iran, like all totalitarian states, the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them. They are silenced not by torture and jail but by indifference and negligence. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s claim that “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” In the United States, it is mainly we, the people, who are the problem; we who take the existence of challenging literature for granted, or see reading as solely a comfort, seeking out only texts that confirm our presuppositions and prejudices. Perhaps for us, the very idea of change is dangerous, and what we avoid is reading dangerously.

…

Reading does not necessarily lead to direct political action, but it fosters a mindset that questions and doubts; that is not content with the establishment or the established. Fiction arouses our curiosity, and it is this curiosity, this restlessness, this desire to know that makes both writing and reading so dangerous.

…

First Letter

We enter dangerous territory when we blur the lines between fiction and reality, or weaponize fiction to further an agenda—be it political, religious, or personal. The totalitarian mindset breaks the borders between fiction and reality, and, in the same manner, it imposes its own fictions and mythologies on the realities of its people, speaking and acting on their behalf.

…

We need the poet to constantly question things as they are, to jolt us out of our comfort zones, to make us to look at the world through the eyes of others and seek to understand experiences that are not our own.

…

The most seductive aspect of a totalitarian society is the security it offers. The truth is uncomfortable, and a dictator promises an abdication of responsibility from it.

….

We don’t need a supreme leader to deprive us of our hard-earned freedoms. When we stop reading, we pave the way toward book burning; when we stop caring, we make way for someone else to take over control; when we prefer personality to character, and reality show or virtual reality to reality itself, then we get the kind of politicians that we deserve.

…

Second Letter

I did not like the possibility of being arrested, humiliated, and flogged. I did not like the prospect of being expelled from my job or having my books censored and banned. But there was something greater than fear—or more magnetic than fear—that was driving me: an instinct for self-preservation. I knew that giving in to them meant self-negation. It meant a public abdication of who I was. It had nothing to do with being an intellectual or sophisticated. It was a matter of self-worth and what Hurston called “self-revelation” and, of course, a matter of preserving dignity.

…

War, by nature, dehumanizes the enemy. Story gives the enemy a voice, forcing us to confront him as a human being, to look him in the eye. And through this process, we restore our own humanity.

…

Living in a totalitarian society is similar to living in a disaster zone. Individuals experience a different kind of fear: the constant anxiety that the way you look, the way you act, the way you think or feel is illegal and punishable. At any moment, you could be reprimanded, arrested, or jailed simply because of who you are.

…

Writing requires empathy, opening up oneself to other people’s hearts and minds. It implies not just how things are but how they could be, which is the essence of hope.

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Fourth Letter

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE role that ordinary, often decent, people play in bringing about a totalitarian state? Such systems may seem to appear out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning. But, really, this is because many choose not to see the warning signs, even when they become all too obvious. Slowly, over time, there is a buildup. At first, the rulers may target people and things that are unsavory to us, and that we dislike or disapprove of—as they did in Iran, when they executed officials of the former regime. So we shrug them off, or we might even approve, but our time will come when they take away what pleases us, what is important to us.

..

Dear Baba, do you notice how, under totalitarianism, banal rituals like putting on body lotion or holding hands with a loved one in the street suddenly become strange and extraordinary? Ordinary people wanting to have a decent, normal life learn that nothing is normal—not really, we only carry the illusions of normalcy. If we don’t pay attention, if we don’t guard against this loss of normalcy, it is easy to lose. This is what we see Offred doing her best to guard against as she tries to avoid the numbing of feelings and emotions that a totalitarian system imposes on us.

…

Memory becomes one of the most potent weapons against the cruelty of totalitarian regimes and concentration camps.

…

Readers become keepers of memory, keepers of truth.

…

Conclusion

READERS, OF COURSE, HAVE NO formal organization to promote truth, to bring about change. But they number in the billions. They range across the spectrums of profession, background, gender, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation. Collectively, their power would be immense. Every bookstore, library, museum, or theater that closes; every book that is censored or removed from schools and libraries; every art, music, or literature program canceled in our schools and other institutions—these should all remind us of our responsibility.

A very well timed book. Not what I was expecting from a book of letters about banned books — a little more personal than something you could recommend to everyone — but I liked it! I loved Nafisi's letters to her father about banned books, about America's present in comparison with Iran. It was informative, raw, and still warm. I enjoyed and learned a lot!

After captivating readers with her debut memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi returns with her fifth book, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. Nafisi implores the reader to look to the power of literature as America wrestles with censorship in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. In our conversation with Azar Nafisi, she makes her case for us to be diligent in our pursuit of defending our freedom to read books that challenge us, encourage our growth, and call us to play in the limitless waters of imagination.

Read Dangerously is a series of letters from the author to her deceased father. Azar Nafisi hails from Iran and discusses issues that pervade the area. She finds solace in reading literature and tries to spread that love to us, the readers.

an important book - necessary reading for all. As with her earlier book, this should be required reading for the information it contains. Thank you for sharing.

I learned so much from Reading Lolita in Tehran and it is no surprise that Azar Nafisi skillfully lays out examples and ideas for using literature to "engage with the enemy."

I enjoyed the introduction, but only finished about a third of the book. It was too difficult to follow Nafzi's points when her examples were taken from books that I had not read.

Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!
I was delighted to see a new book by Azar Nafisi, and one that sounded right up my alley. I did love the stories of her reading the books included and how it intersected with her life. So I recommend it! I have one small quibble, and that is the letter-to-her-father format. I don't mind it being in a letter format, but the continual addressing of him in sometimes nearly every paragraph became distracting to me as a reader. But I did enjoy this look at how reading can get us through tough times.

Read Dangerously is an analysis of the powers of literature that manages not only to dissect the way we use literature to confront societal challenges, but also implores the reader to select and choose books more mindfully. Nafisi chose a wonderful selection of writers, from Plato to Toni Morrison, and weaves them in perfectly with events from her life and the times they were written. I would certainly recommend this book to those who seek transformation when they read, both internal and external.

Fans of the author’s earlier book, Reading Lolita in Tehrehn, will find much of the same flavor and content n her latest. A nerd purr also for the excessively bookish.