Paulos's World Lit Blog

One thing mentioned in the novel that I would like to research is the Shariah camp. The first time I saw this mentioned I thought it was a religious camp to grow someone’s faith in Islam, but the more I think about it the more I find it to probably be more of a camp that is built to manipulate someone based on their religion to become more extreme and more likely to listen to orders that are extreme. Another thing I would like to potentially research is the Bagram camp for prisoners. Based on what I read in the book, it seems to be an extremely torturous camp that was made to house terrorists, but I would like to learn more about the specific torture methods used if people escaped, and if it was specifically for terrorists or if anyone who breaks the law could be in the camp. Something mentioned in the novel that I’m also interested in is “Googling while Muslim”. Aneeka mentions this phrase multiple times throughout the novel and although I have not seen any proof it exists, I am inter...

  I think the reason why Shamsie structured the novel by separating it into four different perspectives is for the reader to understand each person’s thoughts, feelings, and memories. For readers to better understand what is happening in the book, it is almost essential to know what is happening in each of the four characters’ lives from their own perspectives. For example, Parvaiz’s perspective allowed readers to better understand how a Muslim can be manipulated into a person within a terrorist group. If we learned of this experience through Eamonn’s perspective, then we would have seen a more negative view of the experience in the novel, such as how Eamonn saw the homeless man on the street. If we learned of it through Aneeka’s perspective, her familial love for Parvaiz would also feed us ideas that could cause a certain bias towards what the readers see such as how she described Parvaiz to Eamonn when asking him to ask his dad to get Parvaiz back in the UK. By switching the pers...

 My favorite sports moment of all time was when the Cleveland Cavaliers came back from down 3-1 to the Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals to win 4-3. I was a huge LeBron James fan at the time. The first game of basketball I ever watched was in the 2012 NBA Finals, in which LeBron dominated and won his first ever championship. Since that day I have always been a fan of LeBron James, and whatever team he played on. As context to the 2016 championship win, LeBron James and the Cavaliers lost in 2015 to the Golden State Warriors in a series where 2 out of the 3 best Cavaliers players were injured throughout the series. In the 2016 regular season the Golden State Warriors had the best regular season of all time, winning 73 out of 82 games. Also, in the 2016 Western Conference Finals the Golden State Warriors came back from 3-1 in a series to win 4-3 against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Finally, in the NBA Finals, no time has to ever came back from down 3-1 to win the championshi...

 I have had a love/hate relationship with annotating. During high school whenever my teachers told me to annotate, they gave me a spreadsheet of what to annotate and how to such as highlight in yellow a sentence about a recurring theme in the story or in green a simile or metaphor. Most of the annotations I made throughout high school were completely useless to me and I never even read most of them a second time. However, whenever I had a final or I had to write a big paper about a book our class read months ago, the annotations I made began to really help me out because I forgot some themes or maybe the structure of the book. I was really grateful that I made annotations because it saved me time when I was finding evidence for my paper or reviewing how the book engaged with a certain topic. Usually when I’m annotating, it looks like I am just setting reminders for my future self. I’ll write that, for example, this sentence has to do with the theme of betrayal, or this passage expl...