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by Vivek
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List of books I have read

Books are magic.

Review: The Inner Game of Tennis

In the book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’, author Timothy Gallway talks about different aspects of learning (or acquiring) a new skill. He argues that key to acquiring any new skill requires contribution from two distinct entities in your brain, which he calls Self-1 and Self-2. Tennis is simply an example author uses to put forward his ideas and provide demonstration. More so, because he had been a tennis coach and a good player himself. The two selves can loosely be equated to System 1 and System 2 discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his famous book Thinking Fast and Slow. I strongly recommend the latter if you haven’t read it yet.

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Review: Burmese Days

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

George Orwell, Burmese Days

Burmese DaysBurmese Days by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: What is Life?

If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

Erwin Schrödinger

Written by Erwin Schrödinger, an eminent physicist and Nobel Prize winner, the book What is Life? (get here) is an attempt to understand the aspects of life as manifested by living organisms. As philosophical it may sound, the author instead endeavors to understand the organization and behavior of life – from individual cells to higher organism, from the point of a physicist. The book is appealing even to lay readers and builds on important conceptual constructs of physics without delving too much into mathematical formulations.

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