I start at the beginning, keep going until I reach the end, and then stop 
More seriously, I aim for books I enjoy, that are not too difficult/slow for me to read, I try to avoid spending too much time on dictionary lookups, and I try to make a habit of putting in the hours. Back in 2008 (ie some years before I passed N1) I wrote up a probably over-long thing with my views. It includes answers to a few of the questions I skipped here.
There was a thread about this a little while back with other peopleâs takes on the reading process.
I usually only look stuff up when it seems critical to understanding or the same word has turned up multiple times in quick succession. I donât SRS the results. This is partly because I enjoy reading and I donât enjoy SRS and dictionary work, and partly because I have a personal preference for reading paper books. If you prefer e-books you can probably make the dictionary and capture-for-srs workflow less obtrusive, but I would encourage spending most of the time reading nonetheless. Separately, in the run-up to taking N1 I ran though one of the pre-made Core10K decks in Anki (at which point I already knew at least two thirds of it).
Nope. I donât like doing that, and see above about not SRSing vocab. If I did (and recently Iâve been experimenting with jpdb.io) Iâd probably either try to find a pre-made deck or else work off my dictionaryâs history of recently looked up words.
Anything with some Japanese text is better than nothing, but personally I count only books with large chunks of running text that I would read cover-to-cover.