Inspired by a discussion in another thread. Thread for discussion, accountability, motivation, maybe events (readathons etc) related to finishing the books sitting on your shelves.
While the original discussion was about japanese books, this thread can be used for any language books.
Share your goals, any tbr games you might have, your stack of books that need to be read etc.
Oooh, excellent, excellent. I don’t have many physical books, but I do want to work through my wishlist before it gets too out of control.
Thanks for setting this up!
changed title from physical to owned since people might want to join with e-books 
Personally I am more concerned with my physical books but I don’t see why we should limit it.
My ongoing goal has just been a minimum of 5 physical books a month. When I remember, I log them in my learning log. But I’m very “whenever” about it.
Right now I’ve got about 450 books to still go through - but many I’ve read already digitally, and some I’m waiting to reread the entire finished series
This month I’m already in the middle of 4 so far
I have about 30 books on my TBR pile, mostly bought on my holiday in Japan back in April. (I’m ignoring books I own that have been nominated for possible book clubs here, which I have a few of.) The game is “see how far I can get through it before I succumb to temptation and order some more books online” 
.
It’s getting tricky as several of the books I’ve read so far (notably 図書館の魔女 第一巻 | L39 and 薬屋のひとりごと 1 | L39) were really good and I don’t really want to wait a whole year to read the next part…
From time to time I go through my wish list and just delete books, because I am no longer interested in them.
Some other time I do not enter a book into my wish list, as I think that if I am made to read this book it will for sure cross my way again.
Thanks for setting this up @earwen! A quick intro post to my current strategy on dealing with my physical Japanese books; I’m more concerned with them than my digital ones due to space issues.
Manga - Physical TBR
Cutting these down has been a big goal of mine for a year or two (or three) now; I bought a whole bunch of manga sets while still in that “I’m learning and enthusiastic, but most stuff is way out of my reading level” phase, and while I don’t regret it, I haven’t been as diligent about actually reading them as I probably should be. 
So I’ve been baking in yearly physical manga goals to meet (this year is to read 50 of them), which has been slowly but surely cutting down the hoard, but I’m slowly getting to the point where I’m considering taking regular breaks from novels in order to read solely physical manga for like, a month, to speed up the process. I did that in August of this year (update 1, update 2, update 3), and it was a great success by my standards, and honestly it was nice to really focus on one goal for a set amount of time. Exciting to start, exciting to finish, haha.
I don’t suppose anyone else would be interested in joining me for another month of manga in the next few months? Any language welcome, of course!
Novels - Physical TBR
So specifically going through my physical novels has more of a recent, started-this-year goal, as I wasn’t confident enough in my reading abilities to make it worthwhile to leave the automatic dictionary behind. That’s still true for a subset of novels I have, but I’ve been more aggressive the latter half of the year in specifically picking books I think I might be able to read without too much trouble physically, and hesitating a bit before using the automatic dictionary on my Kindle for the ones I read digitally (instead trying to opt to look up the work on my phone dictionary like I would with physical to try to train my brain to not expect instant lookups).
I think that’s been going fairly well; the rest of my physical TBR books I’ve read this year I’ve read the digital version (despite owning the physical) and considered them crossed off, as the book has, in some way, shape, or form, been read.
I don’t have any immediate goals to do a physical-only novel month like my manga, as I can’t read them fast enough to really get that same feeling of accomplishment/dopamine rush, but whittling these down while likely still be a priority in 2026.
Not now, as I just finished a three months manga phase (read 84 of them), and I am now back into novel mood.
But very probably next summer I will again have a manga phase…
I posted game rules for my tbr in my thread, but I overcomplicated them further! I might modify them yet again if the fancy strikes. But here they are for now.
For Japanese
For Others
Bonuses (applies to both jp and other category):
I have space on my shelves so I wanted the rules to be generous. At the same time buying books feels pretty pointless if they will just sit there. Originally I was going to start in the new year with these rules but, that’s arbitrary in the end and the earlier I start the more points I can get.
State of the Shelves:
Japanese: most of the books I own were bought in a bundle of second hand stuff or were gifts. As such, there is some stuff I’m tangentially interested in. For now I’m primarily concerned with reading some of the manga I own.
English: Most of my books. I generally buy stuff I already read digitally, so it’s not huge. But over the years it has accumulated a bit. I also would like to reread some stuff, and finish some series (and in some cases reread some series so I can catch up to the latest installment). Generally excited for everything in this shelf.
German: A mix. Various non-fiction children books, pop science for adults, history, philosophy, art books. Some illustrated classics. Some of these are more reference books than something you read from beginning to end. Very few novels. Reading in German unfortunately is not my favorite and I have to push myself to it (see modifier in bonuses).
Mandarin?: I..have some very simple texts meant for little children 
I will probably not be reading them, I’m not sure what to do about Mandarin right now.
I also have books in my native language but I tend to not read much in it anyway, and it’s pushing it enough to include english books in a language learning context lol
I am planning on focusing on my physical manga until the end of the year.
I actually set up something similar for my English books recently, though they’re much simpler:
So I essentially have to read two books before I buy another. I also have a caveat that if I want to buy a manga, one of the two read books must be a manga. If I want to buy a novel, one of the two must have been a novel, etc.
I’m not particularly worried about overbuying on the English front, but I thought it might be fun to watch my trends through a year.
I’m hoping I can start doing some Mandarin reading next year myself; just really simple stuff like children’s books.
So maybe a +1 in December, good to know…
Interesting thread !
I made an effort to go through my physical TBR pile this year. That included selling/giving away books I knew I realistically would not finish, or would regret spending more time on to finish them.
I am thinking of designing the bingo for next year (if I make one) in a way that motivates me to go through the remaing physical as well as digital owned TBR pile.
Shelf :
A few classics in English that have been gathering dust for way too long, a few books in French (mix of fiction and non-fiction), one novel in Dutch, one novel in German and 5 books in Korean (2 novels, one collection of short stories, one collection of poems, and one non-fiction). It’s very likely that these numbers will increase before they go down though…. I will be going to Paris during the Christmas holiday where there’s a library specialized in east easian litterature, so I’ll probably get at least one korean book, and I am thinking of getting a book in japanese just as a goal to look forward to for 2026 or 2027 (depending on what they have available) since that’s my main “baby language” at the moment. I am not planning to get anything in Chinese just yet as I already have a subscription for graded reading, and reading a physical book seems so far away anyways.
My main priority for next year will be to finally get through these English classics. I don’t want to spend another year looking at them thinking I need to read them (they were all gifts btw). I was just not reading for a while, and now that I am reading again, it’s just been challenging to spread my reading time between multiple languages. I would like to get to the Dutch/German ones, but honestly, in these 2 languages, anything I read will be a win, whether it’s in my owned TBR or not (I somehow don’t enjoy reading in these languages that much. I don’t even know how many Dutch books I DNFed this far). And the reason I haven’t gone through my Korean physical TBR is because I am saving the books for when I will be able to enjoy them more (hopefully sometime soon). I am not too concerned I won’t get to them when I feel like it.
Is the idea to read only manga for the month, or just as many manga as possible? I’m not sure I could manage the first… But the second maybe - depending on the month
I should try to use my physical dictionary more. It’s so slow, bur fj
Either/or. I did a manga-only month as much as possible last time, but I think your results are probably going to be quite similar regardless of which you choose to do.
Cool. Well if you start one, I’ll join I guess
Once JLPT is over, I want to get back to reading at least a manga a week… but maybe I’ll expand that to one digital and one physical manga a week. I have a ton of series I got at book off that are now very much in my reading level but I am super scattered in my attention.
I like people’s points things, I’ll have to think on it, but I want to do something similar, with some bonus points for stuff that I’ve had forever and/or finishing a series (or just what I have is also fine). I’ll probably join you all after the first week of December, but maybe I’ll actually take my tutor’s advice and chill out about the JLPT and read more manga
I spent the first six months of the year reading down my TBR (English included, although mainly Japanese, with some Korean and Spanish thrown in). I’ve read 70 TBR books this year and I only have a few books remaining from before 2025 (single digits!!), so it’s very exciting!
I might join in with this to read down my new purchases from this year, though. After the JLPT 
I have new 20-30 books.
I have so many physical books, so this is a great thread to get involved in!
Physical books I’ve read this year: 불편한 편의점, 금단의 마술, 내가 없던 어느 밤에
In progress: 양면의 조개껍데기, 눈에 갇힌 외딴 산장에서
Dropped: 민트의 세계, 세상의 마지막 기차역, 키친
TBR: 드래곤 라자, 타워, 얼마나 닮았는가, some translated short story collection by Ken Liu, 유성의 인연, 침묵의 퍼레이드, almost the entire detective Kaga series (졸업, 잠자는 숲, 붉은 손가락, 내가 그를 죽였다 etc), some translated Sartre philosophy book
I bought a lot of physical books when I first went to Korea because I didn’t know about buying ebooks. A lot of those books ended up being shit. Also, I bought stuff that was way too hard for me at the time. Last time I was in Korea, I intentionally bought a bunch of paperbacks that aren’t available as EPUBs, but I’m not in the mood to read them right now since I’m on the kimchi reader vocab / mining grind and Higashino Keigo is no longer hard for me.
I intend to force others to read 얼마나 닮았는가 and 타워 with me as they are sci-fi short story collections. Maybe I’ll lower my daily unknown cards in 2026 and focus on reading the detective Kaga series in physical.
(+ Any others I missed) After mulling it over, I feel like December’s a bit too soon for me personally to do a full-fleshed manga-only month, but instead I’m thinking of maybe doing a mini-challenge of sorts? Maybe pick a certain number of manga I’d like to read each week and report back here on what I do read. Or perhaps something else if anyone has any other ideas.
Well, this thread isn’t a day old and it has already motivated me to read a whole manga today. I finally got around to reading The Summer Hikaru Died vol.4, that had been gathering dust on my shelf since [checks Natively] April. I only have to read vol.5 and then I’ll finally be allowed to buy vol.6!
After reading this thread I randomly read 40 pages of 세상의 마지막 기차역 lol. It’s one of those stupid Japanese books that is written just to make you cry several times. It’s also a book I bought when I first went to Korea because the cover was pretty and I liked the title. We’ll see if I can read the second half of it before the end of the year.
