Tag: good thinking

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher opens up with William James’s famous quote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind”. This is one of the most powerful lines that I have come across. It’s so simple yet so profound to execute.

J.R. Moehringer did a fantastic job in writing Andre Agassi’s ‘autobiography’, Open: An Autobiography. He gave his best shot again right after his own famous memoir “The Tender Bar”. Deftly, Moehringer slips into telling Agassi’s life on paper as if he had lived it too.

This weekend I finished reading one of the most remarkable books, The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time by Fred Alan Wolf. Time travel, a concept has always intrigued me including movies based on the same. This book surpasses every motion picture that I have seen so far. Very deftly, Wolf has woven threads of Vedic philosophy into quantum physics and alternative philosophies like Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

“We the Living” is Rand’s first novel and probably amongst the greatest works of nonfiction depicting the life during the Soviet Era, the communist dictatorship in Soviet Russia in 1920s.  The motif runs around the struggle of individuals against the totalitarian state.  

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of those books that pose the fundamental question about the being of humanity. The protagonist, Atticus Finch with his strong adherence to ethics and morality rises above the society with the progression of the novel’s plot.

The Quantum Moment – How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty by Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is one of the most fascinatingly informative books I have read so far. I have recently developed interest in the world of quantum and I find this book fully satiated my curiosity. It is beautifully written for a beginner like me.

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger is an ocean of infinite gems. It is one of those books, which require re-reading only to discern new motifs surfacing up every time. No single review can fully justify the thoughts running throughout the book. I did try jotting down few thoughts but am sure I still have missed some of them, which I might add later after reading it the second time.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg is quite an impressive book. With its umpteen examples of how people defy old habits at the sake of new productive habits and eventually achieve marvelous feat is extremely inspiring. Although the book does not promote or support one secret formula for quickly changing any habit but it makes one think with a different angle. Case studies of corporate success of Alcoa, Starbucks, and P&G’s Febreeze were quite a fascinating read.