I’m posting this on Saturday this week because my Hugos post will go up tomorrow (though not until after the official announcements). See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Iran.
Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (vol 1 of 2) | Marjane Satrapi | 212,288 | 8,651 |
Reading Lolita in Tehran | Azar Nafisi | 135,276 | 13,103 |
The Complete Persepolis | Marjane Satrapi | 186,246 | 6,989 |
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (vol 2 of 2) | Marjane Satrapi | 75,991 | 4,214 |
Ruba’iyat | Omar Khayyám | 21,672 | 5,246 |
Not Without My Daughter | Betty Mahmoody | 35,419 | 1,827 |
Embroideries | Marjane Satrapi | 28,113 | 1,960 |
Persepolis, Volume 1 (of the original four) | Marjane Satrapi | 90,763 | 554 |
Well, I’ve had cases where a single author dominates literary perception of a country, but this is the first time that I’ve had four slightly different versions of the same work in the top eight. And I must say I agree; Persepolis is an outstanding artistic achievement, and probably the first half of it is the crown. Also it’s nice that seven out of eight of these books are by actual Iranians.
I disqualified House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, because it is set in the USA. But I let Persepolis 2 through because just under half of the book (the original part 3) is set in Austria and just over half (the original part 4) back in Iran.
I also allowed the Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam as being mainly set in Iran. Omar Khayyam may not have written all of the poems that are now attributed to him, but he was a very real Persian statesman, scientist and writer, and there are plenty of Iranian cultural references in the poems, which are told from a first-person perspective.
So we end up with five graphic novels (OK, two graphic novels, one of them in four different versions), two first-person factual accounts and one work of poetry. Not bad.
Next up: Türkiye.
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