As I recently went through the list of books that I read in 2024, I began to think about what I want to do in 2025.

I find reading goals expressed in terms of number of books or number of pages a little too easy to manipulate–and not that useful for understanding how I’m truly spending my time. It’s easy to pick up a few books by Stephenson and cover thousands of pages in a few weeks, and I certainly plan to do some of that. However, I also want to set specific goals for what I want to think about and write about in 2025.

For instance, I planned to read 50 books/year in 2023 and 2024, and I failed both times. Looking back, I am very satisfied by my reading experience overall. Moreover, I also did a lot of online learning that complements my readings, thanks to the amazing resources from universities like MIT, Yale, and Stanford. However, the only issue was that I could have sequenced them better. For example, I read Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection by Peter Godfrey-Smith last year. But at the time, I didn’t really know much about philosophy of biology other than what I learned from Dennett and I was really curious so I decided to read it anyway. I am glad I read it; it was interesting but maybe I would get more out of it if I read something about philosophy of biology first.

So, here is a concise plan for 2025 that should help me meet my goals. Within each section, I’ve listed the books in roughly the order I intend to read them but I read at least 3-4 books at any given time so don’t imagine going linearly from top to bottom. (I generally try to read books from different categories together but not always.) At the end of the year, I’ll post a wrap-up to compare the outcomes with this plan. I also intend to publish monthly progress updates, covering both my criteria for selecting these books and what I learn from them along the way.1

Math, Science, and Others

I want to revisit some old friends (linear algebra, diff. eq.s) and learn more about complexity, computation, evolution, cognition and language. So here is a list of books that I would love to read this year.

I have ideas about some research questions in the intersection of complexity and economics and this had a noticeable impact on my selection. I also want to write separately about most of the papers in the Foundational Papers in Complexity Science but we will see. As I write this, I am almost done with Enderton already and also started Mitchell and Braun; let’s hope I can keep up the pace!

History of Science, Technology, and Engineering (for Time Travel)

I am thinking how one can prepare for “time travel” (I’ll probably write more about it soon). So I have been buying books on the history of science, technology, and engineering. I don’t expect to read all of these but still, this is the plan. So far, I have two chapters left in Lindberg so there is some progress already.

Philosophy

I will continue my analytic philosophy quest in 2025 as well. So far, I read Crane and I am not very satisfied; I’ll soon post an extended discussion of the book. I also started Frege and I am loving it!

Fiction & All Others

I haven’t started any of the following, and I am sure I will read more fiction but these are what I have been thinking about recently.

Language Learning

I haven’t decided on the particular books yet but I want to read two books in Latin and two books in Spanish but this is extremely unlikely, even if I allow myself to read simpler books. I’ll just write this as an aspiration and we will see where I end up.

  1. In case you can’t tell, I did not end up publishing monthly updates.

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