Kirubakaran Athmanathan
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Learning Goals till the End of 2026

Sep 2, 2025

I’m turning my general learning goals into specific books to read. Here is what I’d like to read and thoroughly understand by the end of 2026:

(+ 432 240 750 372) =1794
(/ 1794 365) =4

4 pages per day sounds doable. The GR book might be hard to read at that speed, but I’m hoping that the easier books would balance that out. I’ve already read quite a bit of “Annotated Turing” several years ago. So it should be relatively quick to reread the parts I’ve read. I’ve also read a few chapters of “Our Mathematical Universe” a couple years ago. Plus there’s four months of buffer baked into the estimate, for vacations and other life chaos.

Best laid plans and all, of course, but somehow I feel a big shift recently. I’m able to sit down and slowly chip away at my long-term goals, without my inner voice counter-productively screaming at me that I should’ve read all these books decades ago. Years of therapy finally paying off, I’m sure. 😎

Having this reading list planned out helps me stop relaxation time from going to Hacker News, Reddit, and YouTube. That way, I can have a good quality deep-relaxation when I need it AND feel good afterwards for having done it. Reddit definitely makes me feel awful. YouTube can be good or bad, but YouTube Shorts definitely make me feel worse afterwards.

Learning Progress 2026

Updates

  • 2025-10-05 It’s been hard to keep up the progress during my current travel (Italy and Greece so far, India next), but still I’m averaging 4+ pages per day, keeping up with the goal. Instead of it being steady progress, it’s been spiky; 15 pages in a day, then nothing for the next couple of days etc.
  • 2025-09-03 I’m so tempted to expand the reading list, but this project is to cultivate patience for steady compounding progress as taught by The Practicing Mind, so I’ll resist it. I might need to take some detours though, as I’m out of my depth with the GR book.
  • 2025-09-02 Looks like I might need to read Gravity - Hartle before I attempt Sean Carroll’s GR book.