Posts

The Inner Game of Tennis Book Review - Aryan Sachdev

For my last book review of the year, I wanted to read something that would be beneficial to me in more ways than to just learn new things. And this book, The Inner Game of Tennis , by W. Timothy Gallwey, did just that. To start off this book review, I just want to say that the concepts in this book can be applied to any sport, or even your daily life if you aren't interested in tennis. This book goes over how to reach peak performance in anything, but it makes examples about tennis and sports in general.  At the beginning of the book, the author narrates a few experiences he had in the past that led to him writing this book. One specific example was when he was teaching a new tennis player (Paul). But instead of telling him what to do, like people normally do, he instead demonstrated it and then asked Paul to try hitting a few shots and see what works and what doesn’t. This showed him that people learn better when given the task to finish and the tools to do it, but not telling the...
2 comments
Read more

Why Attack On Titan’s Ending Fails

  Why Attack On Titan’s Ending Fails First off I’d like to put a disclaimer for spoilers of 3 different anime/manga (Code Geass, Attack on Titan, Death Note), though not directly spoiling anything it could be bad so you don't have to read this article. Also, many things in this will make much more sense if you have seen/read Code Geass, Attack on Titan, and Death Note. As some of you may know, Attack on Titan ended a while ago and after having some time to jump off the hype train and the chance to hear about the release of spoilers for an addition to the ending chapter, I’ve had some time to reflect and think about the ending with a clear mind. After seeing the ending, I found many similarities between the ending of this series, Code Geass, and Death Note.  Like many people, I was able to draw connections between Code Geass, Death Note, and Attack on Titan. The premises and witty and unpredictable plot are all very enjoyable. Most notably, all the main characters wanna sav...
1 comment
Read more

Favorite examples given in the Art Of War

Image
  The Art of War, top 5 short stories The Art Of War  is a book by Sun Tzu which was originally written in chinese around 2,500 years ago.  This book is about aspects of war, from the types of environments, generals, and soldiers involved, and the faults and virtues which can determine success in a war. It has thirteen chapters. These are about mainly about laying plans, what is needed to win, foraging, choosing your battles, how to handle the army as a group of people, playing to the weaknesses of the enemy,the army and the psychology of the soldiers, being purely logical,  the movement of the army, the types of terrain, how that terrain may be interpreted, the use of fires, and the use of spies. However, the main thing which is stressed again and again throughout the book is the extreme importance of deception in warfare. In the book  Sun Tzu likes to use stories as examples for his points, this leads to a lot of sneaky stories whose genius may be only matched...
4 comments
Read more

Building the American Republic Review by Harsh

Image
  I decided to read “Building the American Republic” by Harry L. Watson. This book is basically a narrative history all the way to 1877. Many important historical events are talked about in this book, such as the Columbian Exchange, Puritan Society, the encounter between Powhatan and Jamestown, and a brief history of exploring the new world from different countries like Spain and Portugal. Even though I have not completed the whole book, I have read enough to have a general idea of what the main book is talking about. The events talked about in the book are in chronological order which allows the reader to better understand colonization and history. I chose to read this book mainly because I was getting bored with reading fiction books. I wanted to give a non-fiction book a shot. Even though I probably won’t complete this anytime soon because of the number of pages, I still might carry on with this book. If you are looking to read a book on history that is easy to comprehend and ...
1 comment
Read more

Top Gun: An American Story by Taehan

Image
           I read Top Gun: An American Story by Dan Pederson. No, it is not the book version of Top Gun the movie, but it is kind of related. It is a very neat book that covers a very interesting chapter of American military history.  The book is a story about the founding of the Top Gun program. The Top Gun program is a special academy for advanced pilots in the Navy. This academy was founded because the US was having a lot of trouble with its pilots in the Vietnam War. They were having a lot of planes being shot down, so this book revolved around the story of how the Top Gun program was founded and how it affected the Navy. I really liked this book because it really told a true story, unlike the movie. It talked about the actual logistics of how this happened, instead of telling an exaggerated story about speed addicted pilots. Don’t get me wrong I love the movie, but it was also nice to have some actual historical information about the subject. ...
5 comments
Read more

Book-to-Movie Adaptations that are Actually Good - Aryan Sachdev

Taking a break from my normal book reviews, here are some instances where a movie accurately encapsulates (or improves) the novel it is based upon. Normally, when someone is confronted with the idea that there was a movie adaptation of their favorite book, they automatically think that the movie remake will always be worse. However, Forrest Gump would prove them wrong. If you haven't watched the movie yet, Forrest Gump is a movie about a man with an IQ of 75 with good intentions. We are taken through the life story of Gump, through his ups and downs, but he always stays optimistic about anything happening to him. However, the book was very disappointing and only remotely enjoyable if you had already watched the movie. The actors, including Tom Hanks, Elvis Presley, etc, and the director, Robert Zemeckis, brought this subpar novel to the screen in an amazing fashion. The second novel I'll be talking about in this blog post is Jaws. Again, this book was rather unremarkable, thril...
5 comments
Read more

Why Attack on Titan is the greatest story of all time (in my opinion…)

Image
     12 years ago back in 2009, manga artist Hajime Isayama created the manga Shingeki no Kyojin also better known as Attack on Titan. As a 3-year-old, I made the worst mistake of my life. I didn’t start reading Attack on Titan until 2019. With the decade-long series having finished just a few weeks ago, I have bestowed it the title of the greatest story of all time (in my opinion..). For those of you who do not know, Attack on Titan is mainly known for its incredible success in the anime adaptation which started in 2013 and has been going strong with 4 seasons with the last one ending next year. Despite its greatness, it has yet to finish catching up with the source material, so I am here to talk about the original manga which finished on April, 9th and is better than the anime fight me, but that’s a topic for another day.      As someone who was heavily invested in it, I found it to be a hell of a journey following Eren Jaeger and his friends trying to ...
2 comments
Read more