For two years from 1995 to 1997, eight women met in a Teheran apartment to discuss books, a gesture that went beyond defiance towards discovering what escape literature could provide from the iron grip of Khomeini's regime. Azar Nafisi now teaches at Johns Hopkins, a far cry from the days when she was Reading Lolita in Teheran. They read Nabokov, Henry James, F Scott Fitzgerald and a score of other works. "In totalitarian societies, these great works of fiction illustrated, the endangered buffer between the public and the private could only be maintained through a healthy imagination," observes Mini Kapoor in a review in the Indian Express. Jonathan Yardley comes to a more contentious conclusion, perhaps, when he asserts in The Washington Post that: "The reading done by these women also should serve as a reminder that Western culture generally, American culture specifically, is far more widely admired and treasured in many Muslim countries than its critics there would have us (and their fellow citizens) believe."