Thank you so much for sharing this detailed journey. I’m on my third novel and I am still very much in the intensive reading stage. I was just feeling a little down recently about my lack of progress. I started to wonder if it was even possible to reach a high level of reading ability while not living in Japan. Having a target like 10,000 pages is motivating.
Great post learner. I’m definitely still in the LN mines but it’s getting easier every day. I actually think at this stage I would have been better off reading prose every day consistently in one burst rather than sticking with the LN club, but my life circumstances are a bit off right now so I’m going to do that once I’ve finished this current book instead. But I can feel myself improving on prose, which is wonderful.
Congrats and thanks for the fantastic write-up! 
This is incredibly inspiring
I would love to make a 100 books read post someday 
I’m glad to hear that my post was useful and inspiring for you! @lifev I also answer your question below.
- I was doing WK until May 2022, while I was decoding my first three novels. I quit at level 45, so I had a good amount of kanji and vocab under my belt already. I didn’t do any SRS again until July 2024, although I did save words I looked up a lot in Jisho and occasionally glanced at them. If you can handle 10-15 minutes of SRS per day, learning five new words a day (mined from what you read) isn’t a bad idea. I was just burnt out on SRS at the time.
- I went from actively learning kanji in WK (1.5 years) to reinforcing my knowledge and learning them through osmosis while reading (2 years). In the past year, I’ve studied the remaining 常用漢字 with Anki. Like I said, I was over SRS, so it was nice to not do it for a while. I probably could have benefitted from doing a few minutes of SRS per day, but I think it’s fine to focus on immersion over SRS if your time and energy are limited to one or the other.
It’s so encouraging to read this, since that’s basically the same path I’ve ended up taking 
Coming back to doing kanji study after having spent so much time reading, it really does feels different to me. Like you see a kanji that’s in a word you know and you can just go “oh! you!” Something about having more of a context foundation to build off already really helps me, at least. I’ve been churning through kanji study a lot faster and with a much higher srs success rate than I was pre-reading, and also just dreading doing it less (still my least favorite part of studying, but I can at least tolerate it)