Half a day later…
Not live yet, but…
I’m looking forward to thoroughly testing this (locally).
With the arrival of December, it’s that time of the year again. The push to finish all volumes I’m in the middle of, so I can complete the year with a perfect count of volumes read (minus a volume or two I dropped along the way).
Most notable so far has been アオのハコ volume 11. Early in 2025, I reached a page that looked like it would be a pain to read on my e-reader (due to the lack of easy lookups), and I ended up not making any progress for nearly the entire year. When I did get back to it recently, I found myself getting through it rather quickly, the volume becoming my favorite of the series so far.
I’m on track to have completed 74 manga volumes in 2025 (an expected decline from prior years). If my pace looks good, I might try to add アオのハコ volume 12 into the mix to finish before the year ends, making it a clean 75. (The partially-read manga volumes I dropped this year probably reach almost a full volume’s worth, but I don’t bother to count those.)
At the moment, I need to keep a pace of about 30 pages per day, but five of the eight volumes I’m in the middle of lack furigana. Normally this would relegate them to reading on my computer at home; hopefully the Mokuro plugin on my Kobo e-reader will allow for a smooth reading experience for reading no-furigana manga even on the bus and during my lunch break at work.
I also have one month to decide: do I aim for 100 volumes in 2026, or plan to use up three to six months flailing around with kanji while not actually learning any?
I mean, when you put it like that 
It’s a few days early, but unless I try to squeeze in one more manga volume in a few days (doable), I think I’m good to get this posted now. (Maybe I’ll re-read 一週間フレンズ。 volume 1, something I’ve been meaning to do before I jump into volume 2.)
2025: The Latest Year in Review
Goals Revisited
Kanji Learning
This year, my goal for manga volumes completed dropped because I spent time early on reviewing easier, known kanji. On the kanji front, I had pretty much zero gains. I never reached the point of trying to really learn new kanji (or even covering all my already-known kanji, and my kind-of-known kanji, and my partially-known kanji, and my may-recognize-in-a-dark-alley kanji).
Flash Cards
SRS? I don’t even know how to spell SRS.
Volumes Completed
For the first time, I lowered my yearly goal. Rather than aiming for 125 volumes, I settled on simply not aiming to beat my 2024 numbers.
| Series | Goal | Results | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| アオのハコ | — | 1 | After pausing volume 11 for most of the year (big mistake!) I’m really looking forward to continuing this series. |
| カードキャプターさくら | — | 7 | |
| からかい上手の（元）高木さん | 2 | 2 | |
| キラキラとギラギラ | — | 0 | |
| シャドーハウス | — | 1 | |
| ご注文はうさぎですか？ | — | 0 | |
| しろくまカフェ bis | 2 | 2 | |
| たいようのいえ | 8 | 8 | |
| とんがり帽子のアトリエ | — | 1 | |
| ハクメイとミコチ | — | 1 | |
| ハチミツにはつこい | 3 | 0 | I took a “break” from this to focus on year-end reading in 2024, then never had the bandwidth and push to get back to it. Has it been a whole year already? I know once I get started with it again, I’ll get through the rest quickly. |
| ハナヤマタ | 1 | 0 | I do plan to continue the series, but there’s no draw for me like other series I’m reading. |
| ひとりぼっちの○○生活 | 1 | 5 | The power of book clubs! |
| ひらやすみ | — | 1 | |
| ふらいんぐうぃっち | — | 1 | |
| ブラザー・トラップ | 4 | 4 | |
| ホリミヤ | — | 6 | |
| ヤマノススメ | — | 1 | |
| ゆびさきと恋々 | — | 3 | |
| よつばと！ | 1 | 0 | |
| ルリドラゴン | — | 1 | |
| 一週間フレンズ。 | — | 0 | Maybe in 2026…? |
| 名探偵コナン | 1+ | 4 | |
| 君に届け | — | 0 | |
| 夜の名前を呼んで | — | 2 | |
| 好きな子がめがねを忘れた | 1 | 0 | There’s always 2026! |
| 思い、思われ、ふり、ふられ | — | 11 | I didn’t have a specific goal, but I liked the series a lot more after getting into the second or third volume. |
| 東京卍リベンジャーズ | 1+ | 0 | |
| 老女的少女ひなたちゃん | — | 6 | |
| 舞妓さんちのまかないさん | — | 5 | |
| 葬送のフリーレン | — | 0 | Did I really not get through a single volume in 2025? |
| 薫る花は凛と咲く | 0 | 3 | |
| 魔法騎士レイアース２ | — | 0 | |
| Something by ヒナチなお | — | 0 | |
| Studio Ghibli cinemanga | 1 | 0 | It’s hard to believe I had read Porco Rosso in 2024, not 2025. (The older you get, the faster time goes.) |
I’d settled on 75 for a while, so getting one above that’s a nice result.
Plans for 2026
Reading Goals
I’m putting my volume goal back up to 100 volumes. (Don’t tell anyone, but my stretch goal is 125.)
This may be a little more difficult for me to track because I intend to try using the Mokuro Reader app this year. I don’t think there’s any kind of goal tracking available, and you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
However, it should be trivial to add in a volume/progress goal tracking as a UserScript, it not built in. So I’ll probably take the time to (plan out with AI to have AI) implement that.
Let’s see what my series-reading goals may be for 2026. I’m not going to put specific volume goals this time.
This list is mostly based on what I’ve loaded into Mokuro Reader:
| Series | Comments |
|---|---|
| ARIA The Masterpiece | New volume out. |
| アオハル | I expect to make a lot of progress on this series, but probably won’t reach the latest volume. |
| カードキャプターさくら | Will continue with the book club. I’m looking forward to reaching Clear Card, which I’ve never read/watched before. |
| シャドーハウス | One volume to catch up with the book club, with another volume’s release in January. |
| ご注文はうさぎですか？ | Still waiting to see if it gets a book club pick. |
| とんがり帽子のアトリエ | Don’t know if I’ll catch up with the book club, but I hope to at least read more than I did in 2025. (I read 100 pages in one sitting to ensure I’d finish up the volume I was partway through in 2025!) |
| ハクメイとミコチ | Offshoot book club or not, I intend to keep reading this one. |
| ハチミツにはつこい | If I pick this as an “easier series with furigana” to read on the bus, it should be quick to finish. |
| ハナヤマタ | No plans, but maybe I’ll read another volume? |
| ひらやすみ | No plans, but I do have two more volumes, so maybe I’ll keep at it a little longer. |
| ふらいんぐうぃっち | Should be a new volume out in 2026. |
| ホリミヤ | Continuing with the book club. This should be the year we finish the series. |
| ゆびさきと恋々 | Continuing with the book club. |
| よつばと！ | Maybe? I’m just really bad at getting to reading physical manga… |
| 一週間フレンズ。 | No plans, but putting on here just in case. |
| 名探偵コナン | I know I won’t reach one volume per month, but I hope to complete more than four a year! |
| 君に届け | No plans, but we’ll see. |
| 夜の名前を呼んで | Although I’m not compelled to continue, I did buy the whole series on sale, so I’ll probably see it through with the book club. |
| 好きな子がめがねを忘れた | Is this the year I read the final volume? |
| 東京卍リベンジャーズ | No plans at the moment. |
| 老女的少女ひなたちゃん | Continuing with the book club. |
| 舞妓さんちのまかないさん | Continuing with the book club. |
| 葬送のフリーレン | Maybe…? |
| 薫る花は凛と咲く | I bought volume 4, so I plan to read that, but I don’t know if I’ll continue from there. |
| 魔法騎士レイアース２ | No plans at the moment. |
Series I haven’t started reading, but also loaded into Mokuro Reader:
- Colori Colore Creare
- きみとユリイカ
- キラキラとギラギラ
- クプルムの花嫁
- くまみこ
- ゲーセン少女と異文化交流
- ニコラのおゆるり魔界紀行
- 天野こずえ短編集
Manga Kotoba
It’s hard to come up with website goals. I have a long list of things I’d like to add, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good fit to add, or that they would work out.
Since I’m going to try using Mokuro Reader, I’m working on a UserScript to sync my Mokuro Reader progress to Manga Kotoba. As I read through volumes, I want to automatically sync my series/volume reading status with Manga Kotoba.
I’m working on a similar UserScript for syncing Natively changes to Manga Kotoba, but I might not finish that one unless there are people who’d use it.
Edit:
I completely forgot to measure out my reading for 2026 to reach 100 and 125 volume goals.
| Span | 100 volumes | 125 volumes |
|---|---|---|
| 12 months | 8.33 volumes/month | 10.42 volumes/month |
| 52 week | 1.93 volumes/week | 2.40 volumes/week |
| 365 days | 0.27 volumes/day | 0.34 volumes/day |
I just need to avoid those 300+ page volumes. Maybe I should go find one of those super-easy series with 120 pages per volume.
Maybe I’m a complete moron, but this is pretty much close what you want isn’t it?
https://reader.mokuro.app/#/reading-speed
Although I guess it doesn’t seem to divide it by years or months.
I’ll discover how useful the stats page may be once I start using Mokuro Reader.
Looking over the listed stats (which are all blank for me at the moment), my initial thoughts are:
-
Anything related to reading speed will be broken because I’ll be doing at least half of my reading on my Kobo e-reader (on the bus and at work). Then, when I’m at my computer at home, I’ll skip ahead pages in Mokuro Reader to match where I am on the e-reader. This should sufficiently (and unintentionally) break all reading speed-based stats and information.
-
The Volumes Completed stat will let me see how far along I am, but it won’t tell me how far along I should be. My old process (used through 2025) tells me how many volumes I have completed year-to-date, including factoring percentages of a volume. If I’m 10% of the way through one volume, 50% of the way through another, and 85% of the way through another, that counts as 1.45 volumes completed.
-
This stats page (which I had forgotten about, so thanks for the reminder!) will be a good spot to build my “reading goal” code, maybe initially as a UserScript, then actually merge the functionality into Mokuro Reader’s code.
congrats!
Nice end of year post. It’s interesting to see the bulk of your reading was based on unplanned enthusiasm 
I read 41% split between Sunday night and Monday morning. It’s so much easier to read than when I first tried with the BBC about…four years ago? (It was summer of 2019.)
Then…I forgot to put the e-reader in my backpack, so I had nothing to read on the bus to work, during lunch, and on the bus back home…
But I still have four more bus commutes in the month, plus one lunch break, with about 95 pages to get through. If I can’t manage 19 pages per reading session (those 4koma parts sometimes are a little heavy on dialogue), I also have evenings and mornings to get a little reading in.
I’ve also started initial work on moving my progress tracker functionality into Mokuro Reader. Will take a little time to get it all in there. (Making it a UserScript failed miserably. I’m liking building it directly into Mokuro Reader a lot more.)
Current (old) setup:
In-progress:
I’ll be pushing my updates to the progress tracker to GitHub.
Planned items to implement:
- Set a deadline and a number of volumes to complete by.
- Figure out the best way to track only specific volumes for deadline/goal tracking.
- Set per-volume deadlines.
- This helps me to see how
far behindon track I am in book clubs.
- This helps me to see how
- Open the volume for reading by clicking on the entry on the tracker.
- Add a progress bar.
- If there is a per-volume deadline, maybe have the volume’s progress bar’s color reflect if I’m ahead of schedule, on target, or falling behind?
- Add effects from old progress tracker:
- Cover thumbnail is partially transparent and fills in with the progress bar.
- Minor zoom of cover when hovering over.
- These don’t match the design of Mokuro Reader, but I like the effects, so I get to add them to my fork.
It’s Day Zero, and I have 19 manga ready for me to dive into:
On the coding side of things, I’m enjoying playing around with Svelte, which is what Mokuro Reader uses. I’ve tried it out before to see if I can incorporate it into Manga Kotoba, where there’s a lot of potential there, but it would be a massive effort to implement in an existing project, especially while also supporting server-side rendering.
I already anticipate falling behind on reading on day one because I’m spending it writing code. Maybe I’d better focus a bit extra on the progress tracking.
My current implementation to-do list (copied from above, and added to):
- Set a deadline and a number of volumes to complete by.
- Figure out the best way to track only specific volumes for deadline/goal tracking.
- Set per-volume deadlines.
- Maybe allow for multiple “complete through page X by date Y” on a volume to help with book club progress tracking?
- Open the volume for reading by clicking on the entry on the tracker.
- Add a progress bar.
- If there is a per-volume deadline, maybe have the volume’s progress bar’s color reflect if I’m ahead of schedule, on target, or falling behind?
- Add sort options, including “fewest/most pages remaining” and “recommended order to keep per-volume goals on track” (subject to better/shorter sort option naming)
- Add effects from old progress tracker:
- Cover thumbnail is partially transparent and fills in with the progress bar.
- Minor zoom of cover when hovering over.
- Clean up the parts copied and pasted from my older tracker so they match the Svelte way of doing things, then push the latest code to GitHub.
Oh Detective Conan is on there!
I know @trunklayer has been reading it recently!
Ah, I just noticed my screenshot has the last volume I completed… I’ll have to fix that before I start reading and wonder why everything is extremely familiar…
It’s a great series (I’ve read something like 40–60 volumes in English previously), but Conan can be rather long-winded when solving cases…
It is indeed, I’m currently reading vol. 21 
I’ve never read any volumes in English, but I watched a lot of episodes in English ten years ago and it was what reignited my interest to learning Japanese, which lead to me joining WaniKani next year – and thus, last year I was finally able to start reading it in Japanese!
Having a holiday followed by a weekend means I was able to get a jump start on reading for the year, and I’ve been nicely ahead of schedule since day one:
I don’t expect to meet my stretch goal of 125 volumes. I fully expect to bring it down lower, maybe to 110 or 100. But it’s nice to have the measures from my old “bookshelf” in Mokuro Reader, and a teeny bit more.
Adding up the percentages read, I’ve completed the equivalent of 2.1 volumes.
(Maybe if I actually take my morning and afternoon breaks at work rather than just working through them, I can get in an extra ~20 mins of reading a day.)
Okay, back to reading Glittering and Glaring, which is the top contender for being my first completed volume of the year.
It was indeed my first completed volume of 2026:
Equivalent of five volumes completed!
I still don’t think I’m going to keep at the 125 volume pace, but it’s nice having the numbers showing I could make it if I put in the reading time.
I have seven more chapters in Shadows House if I want to be caught up with the offshoot book club starting the next volume. If I’d kept at one chapter per day as planned, I’d be about done with the volume by now.
I’ve also yet to start the next volume of ゆびさきと恋々, so maybe this week? I’ve been a bit focused on 名探偵コナン (where I’m just a little under 1,000 chapters away from being caught up with the latest volume!)
Other volumes I expect to start soon (with book clubs):
- 骨ドラゴンのマナ娘 1
- ひらやすみ 2
- ハクメイとミコチ 2
- ARIA The MASTERPIECE 8 (if the book club picks it up)
- 君に届け 1–3 (if they get a speedrun thread)
On the coding side, I’ve created a UserScript to add a Manga Kotoba sync button to Mokuro Reader:
Now when I add a volume, start reading a volume, or finish reading a volume in Mokuro Reader, I can click this button to update the series and volume statuses on Manga Kotoba. (+1 for laziness efficiency.)
I’m also working on ideas on how to update my Mokuro Reader Progress Tracker from only tracking “current year” to being able to add multiple progress tracks, from both pre-defined “current year, current season, next month, etc.” and user-defined (set start and end dates), then then be able to switch between them. It’s all thinking at the moment. I’d also love to be able to do carve-outs like “read X pages today” or “read Y characters today”.
I wasn’t planning on another post just yet, but I have two events coming up that aim to ensure I’ll fall behind on my reading schedule.
First is a bank holiday on Monday. My workplace’s holidays are aligned with bank holidays, so no work for me that day. That means no reading on the bus. No reading during my morning break. No reading during my lunch break. No reading during my afternoon break. No reading on the bus ride home. I almost think I need to just take the bus somewhere to give myself an excuse to read.
Second is that I’m taking Tuesday off from work to head out of town for something, and that’s a trip where I won’t be able to read during the commute, nor during the time I’m away from home.
But before I do that, gotta sync today’s reading to Manga Kotoba:
I like it when things are effortless to update. One click.
I’m really hoping Natively’s recent push for developers leads to an API. I realize Manga Kotoba mostly lacks an API, but Natively has a much bigger audience with more use-case potential due to the breadth of media it covers.
I’ve been working on getting my Mokuro Reader progress tracker updated to support more than “read x volumes in the current year” to have multiple time-frame goals.
Right now, it’s oriented for reaching the end of a volume as counting as a completed volume for the time frame.
I could just focus on these 100 pages over the weekend, and have that count as two volumes completed:
I need to look more into how Mokuro Reader tracks page turns, and see if I can put together a function (or just ask AI to) to analyze the page turns to determine what percent of a volume was read during a given time period. Then, if I read the second half of one volume (50%), and the first half of another (50%), that can be made to count as one volume (100%) for progress tracking.
I’d look to working on that this (holiday) weekend, but I just heard of Astro for the first time, looked into it a little, and now I expect to spend at least Saturday trying out porting one of my static HTML websites from Jekyll to Astro. (With a couple of other candidate static HTML sites in mind, if the first goes well.)
But I also have two weeks of Final Fantasy 2 to play in Japanese this weekend.
I think I have the basic flow set up how I want it.
Next will be working out improvements to the UI and styles, then seeing about how to get the data to utilize Mokuro Reader’s sync option.
And then use it for a bit to look for any issues, things not working as expected, etc.
Maybe add a config option to hide from the navigation things the user doesn’t use. For example, I don’t use the reading stats because they’re completely broken for me since I do a lot of reading outside of Mokuro Reader. Likewise, some people will have zero interest in a Progress Tracker sitting on their navigation bar.
I’m also waffling on whether I want to remove the number of individual volumes completed within a time period, because you can start a volume at 99% read before that time period, then read the last two pages and have it count as a completed volume. It’s decisions like this that really need to be finalized before doing a PR to see if this can be added to the upstream Mokuro Reader application.
I’d say my favorite thing about the tracker so far (aside from making it easy to manage my progress) is that it tracks progress down to the second. When I took the screenshot above, I was 61.1% of the way through my custom “Saturday through Tuesday” progress goal. But if I check it again, time having elapsed (as time has a way of doing), I see:
I’m now 61.3% of the way into the goal period. By tonight, this will have reached 75%. (Thankfully I don’t travel between time zones, or else my progress tracking might get crazy.)
Turns out it would be too big of a conversation conversion for the site I was thinking of, but it also has me considering ways I might change the site’s URL structure if I did go that route in the future.
One week’s worth down!
I’m starting to think 125 volumes may be doable.
Even though I’m not switching from Jekyll to Astro for this one site, one issue that came up with the conversion to Astro is that my site has all generated web files at the parent level, without folders. This was a conscious, intentional choice early on because I had no idea what I wanted the structure to be. And by the time I figured out what I wanted for the structure, it was a bit too late to change it without breaking all my URLs, which turned out to be completely ignored and not indexed by Google for years and years, meaning changing them all probably wouldn’t have mattered.
I decided it was time to rip off the Band-Aid (I’m getting paid for product placement, right?), set up a folder-based URL structure, and set up redirects. This also meant I could fix issues I’ve had with URLs, like how “it’s” and “they’re” in a title become “it-s” and “they-re” in the URL, when I would prefer “its” and “theyre”.
Thankfully, the site only has 500 pages to have redirects for!
And then I spent about 10 hours on Japanese today and…didn’t get any reading in.
But I did learn(?) one kanji in those 10 hours!
It’s a kanji I’m already vaguely familiar with as I see it a lot, but I didn’t have a formal recognition of it. It’s not something I could visualize (I kind of can now, at least for today), and I often couldn’t recall the on reading (but most of what I read has furigana, or I’m using Mokuro to give me the reading, so…)
Why 10 hours for one kanji?
I was putting together this page:
I took the most common words that use 解 across all frequency lists on Manga Kotoba, and went to work getting together definitions of the words and how the kanji contribute to those meanings.
Then I set to work adding an example of each word from manga, which is really time consuming, and I kind of gave up on finishing as my bedtime’s in less than an hour.
On the technical side of things...
…the appearance of this page, with content and manga examples mixed throughout it, is one of my early visions of how content on the site would look. But Jekyll makes it difficult to do this, as I create Markdown pages and cannot include other pages in a Markdown file.
I was able to get around this for the kanji page by working with Jekyll rather than against it, putting all the content in the front matter and then building a layout around it.
One of the first things I did after uploading the page was to tell Google to index it, because after all that time and effort, I at least want random people to find it.
I googled this and the page didn’t come up 
Amazing, the internet needs some kind of system to recognise something definitive like this so everyone knows they can ignore everything else
I probably should bake some SEO (search engine optimization) into the kanji page template. Didn’t even cross my mind as I created the template.
The unfortunate reality of a page like mine is that the only person who really retains anything is the creator. If someone is specifically looking to learn the kanji and words, specifically seeking that out, they might slightly benefit from it. It’s all about the level of effort involved.
Edit: And here’s how you know I hired Internet cats from about 20 years ago to handle translation:
