Readers of the World Unite!

So, while the awesome moment of last week was this (long sought after, hard worked for, can-hardly-believe-we-pulled-it-off kind of legislative high...), and while I will confess to doing the happy dance around the office on Tuesday morning, there were a couple of other cool moments to recall.

This one came in the middle of a pretty mind-numbing hearing on Thursday. I sit through a LOT of hearings, but sometimes they end up being very cool. Like on Thursday, when Ken Burns spoke about the value of the National Endowment for the Humanities and country singer Trace Adkins spoke about the value of preserving Civil War battlefields (could listen to THAT voice all day!).

And like when Azar Nafisi testified on the value of the humanities, particularly reading. She wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, which was on my Amazing Books List circa 2004 and actually jump-started another reading binge, after too long away from books. Her book is a memoir of life in Tehran, described through the tale of the illicit reading group she taught to women in Tehran. Austen, James, Gatsby...and Lolita, of course. I'd never read Lolita before, so I tried, and I honestly couldn't finish it. But I like knowing that I couldn't finish it.

Dave, our subcommittee clerk and fellow English major, said that he wanted to jump up and clap for her because she reminded him why he majored in English twenty or so years ago. I felt the same way. After she testified, my boss thanked her profusely and then told her she couldn't leave until she talked to his staffer, who had been raving about her book all morning. I was beet red but also grateful--got to talk to her briefly afterward, and she wrote Nabokov's quote about readers being free.

Very cool. Almost as cool as finally, finally getting wolves off the endangered species list.

Almost.