Persepolis Final Reflection

After leaning over the edge of the cliff that was the finally of the first half of Persepolis, I thought that it was a good graphic novel. I enjoyed mixing things up a bit with the aspect of reading a graphic novel, and I thought that the panels added both humor to the sometimes dullness of writing from another culture and gave another take on the literal meaning of the text.In many cases the art was just as good as the writing, which is very important in a good graphic novel, and Satrapi accomplished that perfectly.  I definitely think that reading a graphic novel is a good thing to keep in the class because you never know if you will have to read one in the future, and I had never read one before this class. I thought that Persepolis was interesting in that it was a new type of book, and it also provided time for research and facts about a country that we don't really get to learn about. For these reasons, I feel that it is definitely a good book to keep in the curriculum. I just wish that we would've had time to read the entire book (but still at the same pace).

Fun Facts About Iran

As a final blog post, I decided to continue researching Iran. This time I wanted to look up some more facts:

• Serious:
• "Iran" means "Land of the Aryans"
• Iran ranks second in the world in natural gas and third in oil reserves (its capital city, Tehran, suffers from smog).
• Iran has a literacy rate of 79% and a life expectancy of 69 years
• Iran's Mausoleum of Maussollos was identified as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
• Fun:
• The Iranian flag has writing, making it irreversible.
• Eastern Iran is mostly deserts, but the northern part of Iran is oddly covered by temperate rainforests.
• Persian rugs are considered the best in the world.
• Iran is one of 8 countries that start with the letter "I"
• There is one telephone for every three Iranians and one mobile phone for every two. One in three Iranians are online.
• There are at three Iranian English Dailies: Tehran Times, Iran Daily, and the Iran News.

Persepolis Information

For my blog this week, I decided to do a little more research behind the book that we just started, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I learned that Persepolis was actually the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. The city itself has tons of history with many great palaces, tombs, and architectural structures. The oldest found ruins of the city date back to 515 BC, and the city is known to have fallen during the reign of Alexander the Great. As for the book, it has been translated into many different languages, and the various editions/stories are the reasons for the two volumes -- the first one is about childhood and the second about a return. There was also a film adaptation created in 2007 of the book which received 2 Oscar nominations. One thing that I am also interested in but couldn't find were why the sections have such odd names. I didn't look into too much detail for that, because I was hoping that that information would be found in the book. From my research I have found the book to be influential to people's views all throughout the world making me more inclined to reading it.