Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, spoke last week at the Newman Center about the tense political climate in her native Iran and reminded the audience that “every culture has something to be ashamed of.”

The lecture was part of the “Post-News Pen and Podium Series,” which focuses on authors like Nafisi who have written widely influential books and is sponsored by the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.

The book chronicles how Nafisi shared Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita and other banned books with several young women after resigning as their professor at the University of Tehran in 1995.

Patti Thorn, a Rocky Mountain News book editor, introduced Nafisi and described reading the newly published copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003 when Nafisi was still largely unknown as an author.

“It made the Iranian revolution personal for me,” Thorn said of the book.

The young women Nafisi describes in the book, who were pursuing higher education during an era of civil oppression, eventually come to share their teacher’s passion for knowledge. This knowledge gave the young women intellectual freedom even when their rights were restricted in other realms of life.

Although the author categorized her work as “a memoir in books,” it is a lesson in intellectual freedom that applies not only to repressed women in Tehran but to people everywhere. Nafisi spoke only briefly about her book, but this theme echoed throughout her lecture.

Nafisi used her book as an example of how reading can make one feel connected to the world although society could not possibly solve political problems by reading books.

With access to periodicals, newscasts and the Internet, information is widely available but such information, Nafisi said, “is information without context. We’re losing focus on what’s real.”

What is real, Nafisi said, is being connected. She speculated that authors write to feel connected, while readers read in order to feel connected to them.

“It’s a natural curiosity,” Nafisi said, “to seek out books that do not affirm our preexisting beliefs.”

Although Nafisi’s lecture was the last for this season, the series will resume in the fall. One of the forthcoming speakers is Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes.”