10. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
A moving account of an underground reading group for girls held in a post-revolution Tehran, this memoir by Western-educated professor Nafisi is not only one of the best books for teens and adults, it’s also a sort of survey of other worthwhile books and an anthropological and cultural artifact chronicling the drastic change in the intellectual climate of a culture that began to shun the female intellectuals it had once cultivated. A book about reading, Nafisi’s account of her plight and that of her students will give your American teenager a bit of perspective about the great privilege we enjoy in America, free to read what we want wherever we want to.
