As I think we’re supposed to blog a bit about our assigned reading, I thought I’d start us all off while the first book is fresh in my mind.<\/p>\n
I just finished reading Salaam Brick Lane<\/em> and I enjoyed it more than any other summer reading books in recent memory. I liked both Hall’s colloquial writing style and the book’s format and approach to the topic, since I’m more partial to personal, first-hand\u00a0accounts. I’ve always been interested in South Asian culture, and reading about the UK immigrant experience of Bangladeshis was an interesting, new perspective from what I’m used to reading.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0 I most enjoyed reading about a side of London that many foreigners rarely hear about or see. Based on my visits there as a tourist and the pictures of London we get from films, TV, and other forms of media, I have always had\u00a0a vision of London as a quieter, more\u00a0civilized, cleaner-cut big sister to New York City. I live about an hour outside of Manhattan and it has always seemed to be a chaotic jumble of people living on top of each other in a small area, but I enjoy London because it often seemed a little more prim and proper and orderly, both in person and in the media. I now realize that London does indeed have these areas, and that I know next to nothing about the areas outside of the main tourist circuit. I was always looking forward to scratching below the tourist surface of London, but after reading Salaam Brick Lane, <\/em>I’m even more excited for learning about the many faces of the city, specifically the different immigrant cultures and experiences.<\/p>\n Since no one else has blogged about reading yet, I’m not sure if this is the sort of response we were supposed to come back with, but I thought I might as well get going with something before it becomes hazy when I move on to the next book. I also was a bit confused about all the reading that’s expected of us before we arrive in England: Are we supposed to have read the fictional account of life in the East End and Ms. Dalloway <\/em>in addition to Hall, Schama, Wilson and Shakespeare before the London course starts, or will we be reading them there? I assume it would be best for us to have read them beforehand, but I wanted to make sure to leave time for them in my reading\u00a0list this summer if we’re expected to have read them by the time we arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I think we’re supposed to blog a bit about our assigned reading, I thought I’d start us all off while the first book is fresh in my mind. I just finished reading Salaam Brick Lane and I enjoyed it more than any other summer reading books in recent memory. I liked both Hall’s colloquial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[101],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readings","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}