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 ...