Annotating Process

   “Ali and Baba grew up together as childhood playmates- at least until polio crippled Ali’s leg- just like Hassan and I grew up a generation later. Baba was always telling us about the mischief he and Ali used to cause, and Ali would shake his head and say, “But, Agha Sahib, tell them who was the architect of the mischief and who the poor laborer?” Baba would laugh and throw his arm around Ali.
   But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend.
   The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.
   Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was a Sunni and he was a Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing." (pg 25)


Using Marks: In the passage above I placed question marks around the areas that I thought were either confusing or might have had a double meaning in order to realize the places that confused me or could make me see the writing in a different way the second time around. For example, when it brings up polio crippling Ali's leg, I wondered if it had a double meaning of the separation between the families and maybe even the superiority between Baba and Ali or even Amir and Hassan.
Marginal Comments: Instead of writing directly in the book which seemed to be a problem for me, I used sticky notes to write a short summary of certain pages on them. For this specific page I wrote about how the passage was meaningful because Amir was looking back on his memories about Hassan and also his father. I thought it effectively showed the separation between Amir and Hassan. It also showed the importance of class and religions in Afghanistan. This passage was important to the book because the story revolves around Amir and Hassan's friendship and this passage showed Amirs view of his "friendship" with Hassan.
Highlight, bracket, or underline the text: This was easy to do because it allowed me to underline my favorite quotes and passages however I would assume it would be difficult to do this in a book you don't actually own such as a library book. However, in this passage I highlighted, But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend. I chose that specific sentence because it was true in not only Baba's relationship but also Amir's which I found interesting because then why did Baba believe Hassan was such an important part of his life? Of course later on the truth was revealed.
Circle Words: Luckily Khaled Hosseini's diction wasn't too sophisticated making it irrelevant to circle many words however in the instances when he used words from his own language without translating them, that was when I circled words and had to look further into it.
Overall there were a lot of different aspects to annotating a piece however the four tools above seemed to be the most important or at least the most straight-forward ways to annotate.