Cassi's World Literature Blog!

 Overall, I am very excited to delve more deeply into an aspect of Home Fire. In high school, I took AP Research where we worked with the UW Library, and I think this helped give me a little bit of experience in sorting through university library resources. While that process was most definitely helpful, there were a few difficult elements that I am slightly nervous about in starting this new research. The first thing I remember struggling with was finding articles with the exact right information. The research papers we were reading were long and detailed. This was great, but it was always frustrating when there was a paper with a really promising title that ended up not having any information super relevant to what you were looking for. I think in this research, I will need to make sure I am throughly reading and going over the abstract of each article before diving in further.  Another thing I remember being a roadblock was organizing all my sources. At this point, I had no...

So far, there is a lot that has interested me in Home Fire. Coming from a largely white Christian neighborhood, I do not have a lot of knowledge about Islamic culture or practices. This has made a lot of this book very enriching and sparked a lot of different curiosities as we read.  I enjoyed learning about the various cultural clothing, prayer practices, and values. I think many of these could be interesting starting points for a research excursion. However, while these topics are very interesting, I am interested in finding something that has a little bit more relevance to my life today.  Tuesday, I was listening to that morning's episode of "The Daily," a news podcast by the New York Times released each day. It is one of my favorite ways to wake up and start the day off right. On Tuesday, they were talking about the current events surrounding woman's protests in Iran. A large part of the podcast was the morality police, which I recognized from reading Home Fire. I...

 After annotating this first section of Home Fire, one sticky note that I put a star on was on page 22. On this page, Eamonn tells Isma, "it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days" to which Isma responds "I'd find it more difficult to not be Muslim" (Shamsie 22). I went back to this starred sticky note expecting to see a well-thought out, in-depth analysis of the interaction, but instead all I had written was "Perspective-- powerful!" I do not think my sticky note was necessarily incorrect, but I think there is a lot more to delve into there than what I originally said. I think the biggest question to ask here is "What do Eamonn and Isma mean when they state their respective claims?" and thinking about it can go many ways for me.  Eamonn seems to focus through a larger lens, and consider how society views Muslims. Even without pulling from real life examples, the instances of Islamophobia that Isma experiences are boundless. I...

 Hi guys! I, like many of us, used to hate annotating. I remember my first introduction to annotating was in middle school when we were reading a poem. We were told to highlight the similes, underline the metaphors, and box any words we didn't know. We used this system almost the whole year in this class, so I assumed that this was what annotating was. This "one-size fits all" approach that our teacher had instilled upon us made me dread each reading we would complete. I didn't understand why I couldn't write more details on the page or why I couldn't use more than one color of highlighter. However, as my academic career progressed, my teachers allowed us to be more creative in how we annotate. I learned that what works best for me is highlighting and writing myself notes. These notes range anywhere from reactions and questions to full analysis if I have the space. I learned that writing in my books help me understand not only the text, but also my own thought...