Today’s experiment…
Read today’s small piece of 夜は短し歩けよ乙女. It’s hard but not boring. I read through the same passage a couple times and did word look up after and read one more time. I will probably read it again tomorrow and then move on to the next part. These bits are super short, so I think I need it look at this like reading practice and not really “reading.” So when I go home I am doing other reading for fun.
Day 31: January 31st 
名探偵コナン Volume 13 (91% ➨ 100%)
Month-End Progress
I feel ending the month at 8 volumes completed is decent. (In my first year of reading lots, I averaged 2.5 manga volumes per month.)
I’m also partway through eight other volumes, with enough progress to fill about four complete volumes.
I slacked a bit here and there on reading, but since it’s just a hobby, I don’t mind letting other hobbies get in the way.
Ah, thanks for the name! The photos look cool but confusing. I’ve saved some videos to watch later now though 
Funny how all your finished books for the month are flowers 
I finished the same books, but for me two are drinks:
- チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 (finished)
- チュベローズで待ってる AGE32 (finished)
- ユージニア (finished)
I like your reading graphs a lot. I don’t want to track reading time (too stressful), but I think I’d like to try tracking pages. How do you log pages for ebooks? Do you just roughly calculate them based on page count and progress percentage?
January 31 
Home Post
A bit of variety today; I started out with some 山猫 which I think was a bit tougher than it usually is, but still not terrible. I also played some more BU$TAFELLOWS, which continues to be fun and interesting! Things are probably gonna get wild soon 
(I also got quite distracted by Hi-Fi Rush, which I did play in Japanese for a bit but decided to go for English first to just vibe with it and experience it, though I think it’d be very fun to go back through in Japanese once I have a better feel for it )
Update on 闇祓
Finished chapter 1.
I‘m at 22 % now, and sadly this book is turning into an anime. It went a good direction first (her boyfriend turning abusive, which was quite abrupt, but reading her thoughts about him was interesting. Now I want to read a book about an abusive relationship 
…)
And then the anime part came in.
Real spoiler territory (for chapter 1): Turns out her abusive boyfriend is a vampire? And her bully who said stuff like „Can I come to your house“ the first time they met and „This is my last warning, stop spending time with your boyfriend (the vampire)“ is actually a vampire hunter (?) and just doesn’t understand social norms / social distance. So, the bully saved MC from possibly being eaten / her whole family being destroyed by the vampire dude.
And now the MC‘s friend got abducted / seduced by the vampire and disappeared. So MC asks her former bully to take her with him on his search for vampire guy.
Hmm. I guess I just don’t like it when behavior traits / actions of characters that might have been interesting to explore get explained away by „oh well he‘s a supernatural being! And all the things he criticized about me are actually perfectly fine because that’s just how I am and he’s a vampire and crazy and therefore he‘s always wrong!“
I feel like I’m less invested in this now 
But I’m 20% in already and I definitely want to see what the non-school setting is like. So I‘m gonna read on for a bit
January 31
I picked back up 青のフラッグ Vol. 7 which I’d left unfinished a while ago (life happened I guess?) and finished it, now there’s only one volume left in the series and I’m trying to get back in the habit of reading manga so maybe I can finish it this week.
I also played BU$TAFELLOWS about 1.5 hours and finished chapter 3! It’s been fun so far and now that I’m caught up with the club again I’ll try not to fall behind.
The first month of the challenge is over 
I seem to have managed to read every day. It helped that I was reading interesting things. This month I read ユージニア which is a pretty big boi for my JP book standards, and I’ve been following the BU$TAFELLOWS VN club.
For February I’m probably going the bookclub route as I want to try following both the ABC and IBC picks starting this month (unless I can’t get into the books) as well as continue with the B$ club (this is how I call it in my mind 
). If I have time ouside of those, I’d like to read some manga and maybe go back to reading わたしの幸せな結婚 which I was enjoying back in… November? But also dropped because of life. How dare life.
Oh, great that you also know the place I’m talking about! 
@DIO-Berry Here are some pics from the door in question:
Oh I didn’t even realize! I wanted to have the red and yellow colors in there, and flowers also match the book title (with some mental stretching)
Yes, that’s the gateway drug 
I use real page count and ebook page count (in the Bookwalker app) and calculate from there.
Spreadsheet
This is what the entry for one book looks like:
(Zeit = time, Lesetag = reading day, Seiten = pages, Aktuell = current, Dauer = duration)
The font size I chose in the app on my phone (iPhone 11) roughly comes to 2 digital pages for 1 physical page, or sometimes 2.5 digital pages, depending on the book. On setup I enter the digital pages (per my app) and the physical pages (per Amazon), and after each reading session I enter the date, digital page number and duration, and the rest is calculated automatically. (I only record fully completed digital pages for the sake of sanity, so even if I’m almost done with, say, page 150, I would still only record page 149 as “page read”.)
I have one large spreadsheet with all books side-by-side.
The biggest fun is deriving data from this though E.g. the daily page count that I posted above is calculated automatically from this page (the script searches the whole spreadsheet for the date in question and adds the pages). I also generate an overview of my current reading status for the year:
(Jahr (beendet) = year finished, Tage gelesen = days read, Fortschritt akt. = current progress, Lesetag = reading day, Zeit gesamt = total time)
The arrows in the first column denote the books I’m actively reading right now, and if there is a year, then I finished the book already.
I recently moved those books that I finished in 2022 to an “archive” spreadsheet because this page got too crowded for my taste, and the scanning process for the daily pages also became quite slow. That’s why this one looks a bit empty.
If you’d like some help in setting this up and with the formulae, please feel free to reach out! My email address is in my forum header, so maybe we can take it offline if you want.
February 1st
Aria: the masterpiece volume 3 – progress report
Yesterday: Continued up to page 163.
Today: Read up to page 179, finished chapter 25.
This may have been the funniest chapter as of yet.
I cracked up during the rehearsal when Akari played Alicia while having a silly-looking-straight-faced-expression and repeatedly saying ‘ara-ara’ and ‘ufufu’. 10/10 Alicia impression, didn’t notice a difference (sarcasm).
Didn’t help that Akatsuki ended up making a fool of himself and not being able to gift the roses to Alicia because she misunderstood the whole situation.
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Word or expression of the day:
仕事柄 - (しごとがら) - for work, work-related
Honourable mention(s):
予行演習 - (よこうえんしゅう) - dry run, rehearsal
ダメ男 - (だめお) - no-good man, (male) loser
Just casually writing this one and the female equivalent ダメ女 (だめおんな) down for good measure for when I (or someone else) mess(es) things up in the future…
Spreadsheet talk
Ooh, thank you for the detailed reply.
I started one that is much simpler and almost certainly not as convenient. It looks like this so far:
I take the page counts from what Natively automatically calculates when I enter percentage read. Which can’t be right, because according to those stats I’ve read …1110 pages in January? No way. 
I suppose you count actual text pages, and ignore the empty pages at the front and back, plus contents and atogaki and such (if you don’t read it)? Or maybe it doesn’t matter in the long run? I’m sure Natively and Bookmeter just count all pages after all, empty or not.
What I mostly dislike about my setup is that I can’t easily access information on one specific book, and that I have to manually tweak it if I’ve read more than one book on the same day. I guess filters/scripts could go around that, but I might try a more book-centric approach like yours first.
Edit: I added another sheet which takes days and percentage read automatically from the first table, so I guess I’m fairly satisfied with my setup right now.
I’ll leave cool graphs for another day.
Time to do some actual reading (and work, of course).
Finished Volume 3 of Steel Ball Run. It’s still pretty fun. I didn’t feel like I was trying to squeeze for time either. I am going to read 推しの子 volume 2 tomorrow. That one might take me a couple days since its pretty dialogue heavy. I don’t mind at all though.
Gonna try reading ウチの娘は彼氏が出来ない before bed so I can still get book reading time in that isn’t aimed at study.
A bookshelf full of books that can’t be read?!? 
I’m torn between not liking the door for that principle (however cool it is) and just accepting that it’s another cool absurdism like the soda stream sewing machine.
Seriously thank you for bringing this place up. It’s so cool and I totally want to get sliders and onion rings via mail tube some day 
Yeah, sadly… but I guess the books would just topple over a lot and make the door jam a lot, which wouldn’t be nice either… (also it’s an automatic door which opens when you approach, so how would you ever be able to take a book from that shelf? )
More spreadsheet talk
I don’t exactly trust the Bookwalker app percentages (based on some weird quirks I encountered), but
Eh, why not? I read 900 without much effort, and you read faster than I do, so this sounds totally plausible to me. The Tuberose books alone amount to 550 pages, plus the other books you read. 
So I take the ratio between the Amazon page number and the Bookwalker app page number as my base measure. I’m sure this does not align 100% already as the physical book may have some blank pages or something at the start and the end. But when I start reading, I take note of the ebook page number where the first chapter starts, and I don’t take the pages before it into account when calculating the difference. E.g. I haven’t started reading this one yet, so the table looks like this initially:
and the difference formula is “physical pages - 2.91” while for all subsequent entries the formula is “delta of physical pages wrt the previous entry”.
When I start reading I just update that row with the date and the actual page up to where I read, and it calculates the difference of read pages correctly.
For the end of the book, I just go up to where I read and then call it a day. E.g. in my first post, for AGE22 I read up to ebook page 410 while the Bookwalker app shows me 415 pages in that book.
For blank pages in between, that’s just what it is I don’t discount them or anything. Same with pictures (I rarely read books with pictures in them but e.g. The Little Prince had a lot of them) or differences in font (once again a shoutout to The Little Prince who had much less text on one page, bumping my reading speed to almost 30 pages per hour ). But it’s like with dialog-heavy pages vs. descriptive pages, this is just a factor for a given book, and I’m not going to do a character count in order to mitigate that
Yes, that.
It all boils down to what you want to put into it and what you want to get out of it. Looks like you’re capturing the essence of interesting information with minimal overhead, and that is probably even better than my approach in the long run!
I haven’t read a lot the last few days. Recently got home from a long trip and going away for work soon, so sorting the house.
31/1 7 pages Spy Family, 2 page 夜カフェ
1/2 6 pages Spy Family
Also, someone I’ve worked with for a long time died suddenly yesterday. Found out today. Hadn’t seen him for the 2 months I’d been away. I’m sad.
Oh no! 
My condolences.
I’m so sorry for your loss. 
2 月 1 日
からかい上手の高木さん Volume 1 Chapter 4 
Finished chapter four titled 筋トレ. Read through the full chapter last week. I pretty much got the gist of what was happening but I can’t translate the text word per word and some of the internal dialogue by Nishikata just passed through my head. So I went through it again with the vocab list and grammar points from the ABBC forum. As for the ABBC that starts on Feb 18, I’m still thinking whether or not I follow the page by page translations like some people do in the threads, or just have fun with it and be a lurker in the forum.
My first ABBC was a science book so word by word translations were easy, I don’t know how well it works with manga. Doing direct translations was a good learning tool, though.
I just looked through the ABBC for the science book and some of the discussion threads and now I’m thinking about getting that textbook and reading it too! Thanks for the tip off. Seems like I’d learn a lot of useful words.