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The shelf

The three books I'd buy, and the one subject I wouldn't

Four subjects, three books. Nothing here is sponsored, nothing is an affiliate link, and one row tells you to keep your money.

There are no affiliate links on this page and there never will be. Nobody pays me to name a book, I do not earn anything if you buy one, and I have not linked to a shop — search the title wherever you normally buy things. A recommendation someone earns a cut on is an advert wearing a recommendation’s clothes.

Physics

MTG Previous 10 Years Questions

Ten years of real board questions in one place. Physics repeats itself far more than it feels like it does while you are panicking, and after thirty of these you stop meeting genuinely new questions — you start recognising which of about ten shapes you are looking at.

Chemistry

MTG Previous 10 Years Questions

Same reason, and it matters more here. Organic especially is pattern-based: the conversions and named reactions come round again and again, and the only way to get fast at them is volume.

English Core

MTG Previous 10 Years Questions

People do not buy books for English and then wonder why the writing section costs them marks. The formats — notice, letter, article, report — are fixed, and previous years show you exactly what a full-mark one looks like.

Mathematics

Buy nothing

Do not buy a book for Maths. I did not, and it is the paper I scored highest in relative to effort — 71 out of 80, untouched by moderation. NCERT plus past papers is genuinely enough, and a reference book mostly gives you a way to feel busy without solving anything.

Do this instead

  • Previous year papers. All of them you can find.
  • The NCERT exercises — every one, not the ones that look interesting.
  • The NCERT miscellaneous exercises especially. They are harder than the chapter exercises and they are the ones people skip.
  • Ushank sir’s question videos and question marathons, on the same channel as Ashu sir.
  • Follow a few accounts that post integration questions and solve them. Not for the teaching — for meeting a question you did not choose, every day, on a screen you were opening anyway.

Before you buy anything

Both of these are free, official, and better than most of what you'd pay for. Work through them first and you may find you don't need the book at all — which is the outcome I'd rather you had.