The Book Hub 📙🐻

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I've been slowly ploughing my way through my other books, that I thought it would be a good time to start a new one. This book I got for my 15th birthday and its the Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I've never read his other classics like Animal Farm. I was told that Orwell's writing style was always a bit complicated to understand but reading Homage to Catalonia so far has not been too bad. I had to look up some of the historical context behind this book before reading it since I don't know so much about the Spanish Civil War. All I knew was that the book was based on Orwell's personal experiences as a militiaman (a member of a militia which is an army formed from the civil population in this particular emergency) fighting for the Republican army during this war. What I found was that on the 17th of July 1936, led by General Franco, the Spanish army started the Spanish Civil War by rebelling against th...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today I wanted to talk about something that I heard on TV that actually has got a lot to do with the book that I'm currently reading. I was watching Doctor Who and it was the specific scene, where Bill, the Doctor's companion, starts stamping her foot because the Doctor doesn't try to save the poor boy who's just been killed by a bunch of aliens. Understandably so, she's upset that the Doctor doesn't try to save the boy and it shocks her because she's never seen a person die before. She also begins to question how many people have died because of the Doctor. The Doctor then replies saying that he's lost count and this outrages Bill. Anyways, long story short, the Doctor says something that I thought was quite philosophical. He said that he is over 2000 years old and that he doesn't have the time to be outraged. This really made me think because in modern day society, there are so many people wh...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Michelle made it to her favourite high school, Whitney Young; after excelling in her academic education, she decided to try and make it to Princeton. She went to her first appointment with the school counsellor to have a talk about college life, as she was in her senior year. She recalls nothing much of the experience as all that she can remember the woman saying to her is that "you're was not Princeton material." It damaged Michelle's self-esteem quite a bit but she bounced back from the experience; she was determined to prove her wrong. It took a lot of studying and hard work to get there as she always got her high grades through hard work. However, Michelle was obviously pleased when she got the letter through the post to let her know that she made it into Princeton. This was a big achievement for her because not only had she proved the counsellor wrong, but she also achieved something that her parents could ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, We are finally entering part 3 of If This Is A Woman, by Sarah Helm. So far, we've looked at Ravensbrück and how women were treated there, at the beginning of the Nazi reign. Then we looked at Auschwitz Berkenau and the awful conditions that women were living in there, at the beginning of the Final Solution. Part 3 however, is a little bit different because it's talking about 1941-1942, where women were serving at the front in places like Stalingrad, when the Nazis had tried to take over parts of Russia. Many of the women were doctors and nurses and were aiding the injured in battle. However, some were caught by the German army along the way. They were forced to walk for miles and miles across treacherous land. They were hauled into carts and locked in with barbed wire, so they couldn't escape, even though they were starving. The first camp they went to, they were forced to work on munitions for the German front; the ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Recently I've been reading Becoming Michelle Obama by Michelle Obama herself. I wasn't really sure what to expect with this book but my mum read it before me and she said it was really good and she was the one who actually recommended it to me. I've also seen this book mentioned on the Zoella Book Club and I gathered that it was clearly a popular book amongst many. To be honest, I cannot disagree. So far, it has been a really interesting book to read, and I think that Michelle is a real inspiration. She does talk a lot about the black rights at the the time she was born, during the 50s and 60s but it's authentic to her era and some of the things she described were raw and true. She talked about the segregation between the south side of Chicago and the north, where a significant number of white people lived. She also talked about how her friends regarded her, as a young girl. She was taught at a very young age, by ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I've always loved reading and I've always loved writing. I wasn't exactly the best at either in the classroom environment but ever since I started my blog, I've begun to realise my true passion behind it. Writing is an excellent way to engage your thoughts with the reader and on the most powerful occasions, a reader can be moved by what you put down on paper. Reading is an excellent way to engage with other minds and understand the context of the world you live in and also the different ways in which people perceive the world. I like looking at different perspectives on things because it's like walking in somebody else's shoes and you soon realise that you can relate to how they feel and that doesn't make you so alone anymore. Due to that, I've always been so interested by book clubs. I've never been to one myself and I've never been in charge of one myself either but the simple case of tal...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I've been continuing reading Sarah Helm's book, If This Is A Woman, and the section I've been paying close attention to was this time not about Ravensbrück, but actually about Auschwitz Birkenau, in Poland. I was completely and utterly shocked by the way the women in the camp were treated. By this point, it was quite late into Hitler's reign as Fuhrer, and the Final Solution was already being implemented. I thought that Ravensbrück was bad, but Auschwitz was a hundred times worse. Women were being transported like cattle from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz. Before, the women didn't know of their fate, but when they hid notes in their clothes about where they were, the women back at the camp now knew that they were heading to another bigger camp. The women never returned, either because they remained at the camp or they were being gassed as groups, since many women prisoners had to make selections about who was sick ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Tomorrow, I'll be going on holiday to Portugal with my family. We will be staying in a small house in the mountains. There's a swimming pool and lots of places to go on walks but there will be no WiFi so I'm going to bring my own entertainment. Lots and lots of books. I feel like I haven't been reading as much as I should have been reading this summer so this is a great time to catch up. Without further ado, let's get on with the blog post. The first book I'll be taking with me is Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London. It consists of two books in one and I'm hoping to complete both of them. I've begun reading Call of the Wild and I must admit, it isn't my favourite because it lacks description and instead of you figuring out what the story is trying to say, it tells it for you which makes the story boring and less interesting. However, the storyline is good as its set in the height...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Over the month of July, I've been trying to finish reading All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot and it was only a few days ago that I managed to finish it, after a full day of reading! Haha. Just like his previous book, I really enjoyed reading this memoir. In comparison to the last book, you can tell that James has gained more of a reputation as a Yorkshire country vet in the Dales. I felt like, as farmers got to know him a little bit better, you could tell what their final opinions were of him and whether or not they liked him because some of the farmers could be a bit rude sometimes. You could also figure out what James's final opinions were of the farmers and whether or not he liked them.  One time, James came back from a shift, all flustered and angry because a farmer was being quite ignorant of his work. Siegfried, his boss, told him to charge extra when the farmers are being mean. When him and James t...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, In James Herriot's book, All Things Bright and Beautiful, I read a chapter about how he had to work during Christmas and in the cold weather. It was quite funny, actually, because on Christmas Eve he was expecting to get a lie in the next day but he was actually awoken by a phone call which he originally thought was his alarm clock. The person who answered the phone was Mr Brown, the farmer, who had a cow down for milk fever. The farmer was quite mean and selfish because he told James to hurry up, he kept him behind after injecting the cow with medicine to voice his concerns about the other animals, and he complained about the vet bills being too expensive. I just found that that was incredibly ignorant of Mr Brown to do that. When James returned to Skeldale house, his wife Helen, said that he got another phone call at another farm about a female goat that was choking. The goat was called Dorothy and it turned out that she at...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I feel like everybody goes through a period of time when they just don't want to read. Recently, I've been quite busy with work experience and school and I didn't have the time to get much reading done. However, there have been quite a few books that I've been reading recently, that I've been meaning to get through but just hadn't had the time to. What I decided to do, to help me with getting a bit more reading done, is to read in every spare minute of my time. For example, when I come back from the dance studio after work experience, I can perhaps pick up the book I'm reading and read it while I have the time. Even if it's just for 5 or 15 minutes, I find this really effective. I also try to read before I go to bed because that's when I find that I have the most time during my day and I find that it really helps me get to sleep a lot better. If I don't have time at night to get much readin...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As some of you may know, if you follow what goes on in my main blog, on Thursday I celebrated my 15th birthday. I was given quite a few books to read. The list goes like this: Let Sleeping Vets Lie by James Herriot It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet by James Herriot   Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E.Frankel   War Horse by Michael Morpurgo   The Choice by Edith Eger   The Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell I'm really excited to read all the books but I'm most excited to read The Choice by Edith Eger because it's about a dancer who survived Auschwitz. She was sent there at the age of 16 and she was made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. Surprisingly, when the camp was liberated, she was pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. This sounds like a truly inspirational story and I can't wait to read it. I'm also excited to read Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankel....

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As I'm sure you all know already, I've been reading the second book of James Herriot's memoirs as a Yorkshire country vet. One of his friends/colleagues and brother to Siegfried, is Tristan. Tristan had quite a mischievous personality and was always known for making his older brother very angry. One time he crashed both of Siegried's only cars and this sent his brother over the edge because they needed the cars to carry all the expensive veterinary equipment and to get from farm to farm so it was certainly an inconvenience. However, this time, he did something even worse. There was a country myth going around that this monk would turn up by this chapel on a specific night and as soon as the drivers saw him by the road, they would rev up their engines and soar up the road. Little did they know that it was actually Tristan! One time, he played the prank on James and heard him soar off into the distance after coming ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I feel like I've been talking a lot about Sarah Helm's book, If This Is A Woman and I've kind of been neglecting some of my other books that I've been reading so today, I'm going to talk about James Herriot. If you don't know already, I'm reading his second memoir, All Things Bright and Beautiful because I really liked his first book and I thought that I would delve into the second. We all know the challenges of being a vet. Especially a Yorkshire country vet like James. Sometimes you have to separate you social life at home, with your working life on farms. This can be very difficult because sometimes country vets get called in the middle of the night to deliver a calf and they have to work during the day to treat a large cattle group for husk. It can be very strenuous work. One thing that I would find the most difficult is when it comes to helping everyday stray pets. On his way back from a farm on...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, If you follow my main blog, Keeping Up With Juliette, you will know that I've been wanting to talk about this topic of inward terror in a concentration camp for a while now. I know that I keep going on about this book and I promise that I'll be talking about some more of James Herriot's second book later on next week but I think it's really good to touch base on this topic. This book is so incredible because I keep on finding new things to talk about as I go through it which is a rarity for a lot of books that I read. If you've never done GCSE history before in the past, then you may not know about the prospect of inward terror within a concentration camp. The Nazis used this form of terror to ignite anger amongst the prisoners themselves so that they were the ones being violent and the Nazis were the ones who didn't have to do anything. If you haven't seen my previous post, then you won't know a...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As I've mentioned in my previous post, I'm currently reading a very interesting historical book called If This Is A Woman by Sarah Helm. Whilst it's a very accurate and fascinating book on Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, it does reveal some shocking truths on how people were treated. Drawn to the 'red Vienna,' a woman named Hanna Sturm, joined a trade union and helped fight anti-fascist battles during Austria's turmoil of the 1930s. However, this often lead her being imprisoned behind bars. Sentenced to 'aggravated arrest' in Ravensbrück, Hanna was confined to a small wooden cell which was 2 metres wide and 2 metres in length. The cell was dark so whilst she tried to get used to the darkness, she often lost track of time. She also had no bed, no mattress but the floor to sit on and only a proper meal was provided on Thursday once a week. 100g of bread and a bowl of so-called coffee was gi...