Oh yes, for sure. There’s bound to be a bias somewhere, but I think I didn’t pay full price for more than maybe 10% of those, and probably 60-70% were free. A lot of the manga I really liked were also free… or the first volume(s) were. 
I’m going to work on my backlog this year.
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I totaled 47 novels and 81 volumes of manga. I read 26 of those volumes aloud: a bit of ハイキュー (one of which I forgot to log until just now) with Bri and @tiny_river_otter, a bunch of 7SEEDS with Bri, and the first five volumes of ふしぎの国のバード with @rodan.
Obviously my favorite thing this year was 伯爵と妖精, of which I read 28 books. After that in terms of novels I probably enjoyed 乳と卵, はめふら, and 獣の奏者 the most. For manga I reread the 27 read-aloud volumes, which was time-consuming, productive, and a delight, and then had periods of being hooked on スキップ・ビート, ミステリと言う勿れ, and 鋼の錬金術師, all of which I love and intend to read more of. Also a fair amount of 魔王城でおやすみ, which always makes me laugh.
I’m looking forward to reading a mixed bag of stuff in 2022!
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I read 11 books and 10 manga.
The books I enjoyed most this year were 1Q84, Book 1 上 (technically I started it in 2019 but dropped out because it was still too hard kanji-wise, and picked it back up after it was released as ebook), and MORI Hiroshi’s Saikawa&Moe series. Regarding manga, I still find it difficult to read them, but it’s slowly getting easier. I encountered a few series I might really like, especially 鬼滅の刃 (just hoping that it doesn’t get too repetitive after a while) and 台所のドラゴン.
My biggest discovery was how much easier even high-quality thrillers are written compared to “proper” literature. In hindsight this looks pretty obvious 
but I had never really thought about it. I guess it’s because they are geared towards a mass-market, so they are required to be an easier read compared to literature.
In the second half of the year I focused on grammar and vocab and did not read much. So from that point of view I am not satisfied with my progress. On the other hand, I learned N2 grammar and a lot of important words, and after picking up reading again, I can already feel that my general understanding has deepened. And I’m surprised how many grammar points I can now identify that I just glossed over before, “because they are just made up of words” so I didn’t even realize they were grammar points
Looking back now, I think it was a valuable interruption and therefore I am overall very satisfied with my progress.
In terms of numbers of books that I read, it was not a particularly exciting year. But I am starting to figure out which books I like and how I can find more of them, and that’s a discovery that made this year a really good one 
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Oh boy, you make me worry that I’m missing a lot of nuance since I also don’t know a lot of the N2 grammar points. Honestly, there’s probably still some gaps in my N3 grammar… 
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If you’re reading stuff like 1Q84, number of books looks a bit misleading compared to the actual amount of reading in there, haha. Nicely done!
Thanks! Yes, it’s always a bit tricky to just look at book numbers, and 1Q84 was not the fattest one in the list (I think two of them were 500+ pages and one was 400 pages, but tbf there was also a short story of <20 pages that I also counted as a book 
)
If you’d like a more precise number, my bookmeter stats says I read 4970 pages altogether. 10 manga are probably around 1800-2000 pages? So 3000+ pages of books, that’s not too bad actually! 
Luckily many of the grammar points are actually just what the words mean by themselves, so you should be covered for those. But some are of course unintuitive or even surprising…
If you’re interested in quizzing yourself a little bit, you could go to the Ogawa Mimei book club that took place last year in the Beginner book club. In the earlier weeks I wrote a grammar summary post each week (should be pretty early in the threads), where I’d point out a handful of grammar that stood out to me. I quoted the respective sentence and then linked to an explanation of the grammar point in question. N2 grammar was freshest in my mind at that time so I guess most of the grammar points I listed were actually N2 or so. You could have a look at the sentences and see whether you can figure out the meaning of the grammar points on your own. (Dunno how practical this is though, as the sentences are of course not geared towards being understandable in a stand-alone fashion. Just an idea 
)
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I’m looking through them a bit now.
I knew the four you listed in week 1. The 教わりましてから one is funny, because while using て form of ます doesn’t seem to be used much these days, I noticed the same thing when I was reading 銀河鉄道の夜.
I looked through a few more weeks and knew most of the ones you listed. I even knew 致しまする because we saw a similar thing when reading 狐笛のかなた. Granted, many of them were older forms which I’m relatively familiar with because I read fantasy books and manga and they tend to show up there. I generally have more trouble with the に + word in て form set phrases like について・につれて and so on because I often can’t keep them straight. It would help if I knew the underlying verbs better and was also better at thinking about the meanings of those verbs more abstractly.
Thanks for the suggestion. It was really interesting looking through those.
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Nice 
That’s what I was expecting, give or take.
Yeah, there are a few funny and confusing ones among these If you happen to come across the Shinkanzen Master grammar book at some point, they first explain all the grammar points and then explain their origin or group them by their common main word, which I found very interesting. Here is the page that deals with those words you mentioned:
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I do have the N4, N3, and N2 grammar books, but I’ve only actually gone through the N4 book. Also, that page you posted is terrifying. I see many that I’ve encountered before, but I probably only know about 3-5 of them. 
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I’m not going to show you the pages that list the 20 grammar points that contain もの and the 25 grammar points that contain こと 
Those were the most terrifying ones of the whole book 
Which of the grammar books has that by the way? N2?
Yes, Shinkanzen Master Grammar N2.
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