I have reached lv.60 for WaniKani and has build up a certain amont of vocaborary in my memory. I would like to carry on to improve on my reading skills. I know the next step is probably find something to read as many other suggested. However, for my current level I can probably only read simple articles like NHK Easy News or children’s story, which is just not fun to read, while materials that truly interested me are still too difficult to read (I am able to read them if I try hard with lots of time in checking the dictionary)
I understand I need to put in the effort to master a language, but I would really need some kind of progress bar to tell me how far am I to the target to make it bearable. Is there anything like WaniKani, where I can have some leveling or progress system that I know how much more boring reading I need to do until I can truly ready something more complicated that truly interest me?
For reference, here are some examples of light novel that I really want to be able to read in Japanese:
I don’t know of anything like that, but honestly, you’re just going to have to read simpler stuff to start with.
The difficulty of something like Monogatari isn’t just the words, it’s the long multi-subclause sentences that start at page 1, sentence 1.
The first 3 books of Mushoku Tensei are relatively easy (you can skip some of the tedious descriptions of the magic & sword leveling system…), and So, I’m a Spider, which is fairly fast paced, is similar. コンビニ人間 is an excellent early serious book, it’s well written, but the main character isn’t especially wordy.
I would take JPDB ratings with a pinch of salt, the relative levels don’t accord with my experience.
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Maybe try to find a children’s book on a topic which interests you, like science or nature or something? I’m eyeing some on Amazon Japan, like this train book:
Edit: If you want a Wanikani-like app to improve your reading/grammar, there’s Bunpro.
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Seconding bunpro for the grammar studies – I believe you can set your reviews to some form of reading review, although I can’t say for sure because I use the grammar-input style reviews.
Other than that, I use manga for reading practice. It gives more support than a light novel would because of the comic panels and furigana, but still has more of a story/is more interesting (for me) than graded readers or other non-native oriented study materials. I’ve heard about online dictionaries/tools to let you look up words or grammar that you don’t know as you read, too, but I don’t know which ones those are because I read hard copy volumes 
I feel like one of the names I’ve heard a lot is yomichan? Yomitan? something like that???
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Yomichan it was, Yomitan it is 
(yomichan got discontinued, and yomitan is a successor)
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