In Azar Nafisi's novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author strongly claims that a good novel is subversive, meaning that it challenges an established government. I agree with her. Set in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a bibliography of an educated Iranian woman. Nafisi, after living in America for seventeen years, comes home to a place that was once sentimental and special to her (Nafisi 81). However, as Nafisi soon discovers, her homeland has changed drastically since she left it. The author is not only a professor at a public university, but is also the head of a clandestine reading group that is comprised of several of her female students. The author argues that a novel should challenge accepted ideas and authority, all the while making bold interpretations and observations that speak out against the crowd. Nafisi's...