Curate, connect, and discover
I'm linking some of MoonIvy's reddit posts, in case you'd like to read about their language learning journey. They are awesome! They're one of the authors of the Heavenly Path Reading Guide! That guide is super helpful, and I followed a lot of it's advice (and Heavenly Path's recommendations) once I was starting to read more. Heavenly Path also has a ton of recommendations of things you can read that are different difficulty levels, so I suggest browsing their suggestions if you have no idea what to read.
Also, if you use Readibu app, the app can give you a rough estimate of the HSK level of the chapter you're reading (you'll just open the chapter you're reading, click the book icon in lower middle of screen, then click Stats. You'll see a Comprehension % by reader's HSK level). For beginners, I suggest you try to find novels that say 90% or more over the HSK 4 level, or at least 80% and up if you can't find anything easy at first. Once you've moved from graded readers to simpler kids novels like 秃秃大王, novels with a 90%+ comprehension at HSK 4 level above will be the next easiest for you to read. (Later on: if you're looking to extensively read and barely look words up, look for 95-98% comprehension at the HSK level you think you're roughly at). For example, I'm reading 盗墓笔记 and it's 93% comprehensible for HSK 5 level, 98% comprehensible at HSK 6 level, and my vocabulary range is between HSK 5-6 roughly so it makes sense I can read dmbj extensively if I want (without word lookups and still understand it), but still have several unknown words I could look up if desired.
From intermediate to native webnovels in 18 months (Some wonderful mentions of what MoonIvy read. I also read 秃秃大王, 大林和小林, and 笑猫日记 by 杨红樱 and felt they were really good novels to read after graded readers but before novels like 盗墓笔记 and 撒野).
21 months of reading native books, and breaking into native platforms
Learn Mandarin Chinese to read danmei — it will be challenging but worth it
I can read novels without a dictionary after 3 years of reading danmei (Chinese boy love)
I reached 3,000 unique character knowledge by reading children's books and danmei (Chinese boy love)
Some little notes of my own experience, I guess in relating to the journey others took. So: for me, I read stuff WAY harder than graded readers, when I initially tried to read webnovels. It was hard, and it probably made me feel more exhausted than I needed to feel. But it was motivating. So if you really enjoy X difficult novel, you can try to read it whenever, and keep reading it as long as you feel the desire to.
There was one person who shared their reading experience on the chineselanguage subreddit (I'm trying to find the post again) who read 撒野 after like 3 months of initial study. That's way faster than I would've tried! That's a huge spike in difficulty from knowing nothing to reading a novel with thousands of unique words in a few months! But some people just will find that they enjoy doing that, and it works for them, so don't be afraid to just TRY doing what you want to do and see how it goes. It might go awesome. And if it's so hard it's demotivating, you can always go look for something easier for a while.
I tried to read 镇魂 from pretty much my first month, and never got farther than a couple paragraphs until over a year of study. I'd take a glance at it once in a while, and see if it was easier to read, until one day it was 'doable' to actually try reading (while looking unknown words up). I tried reading 默读 from like month 5 onward, usually using a parallel mtl text and only picking up a few words, it was not doable to read until maybe 1.5-2 years into learning. I was already reading the mtl of 默读 because the english translation only had like 20 chapters back then, so I just would try to read the chinese original in small sentence pieces at times. Around 8-10 months I started trying to read 天涯客, and it kind of was doable in Pleco app's Reader as long as I looked up a lot of words. It used to take me 1.5-2 hours to get through a chapter, then over the next 6 months things got better and it'd take 1 hour then 40 minutes then finally 20-30 minutes per chapter. At the same time as reading 天涯客, I also read 小王子 around month 12 extensively (looking no words up) because I had the print book and wanted to practice reading extensively, I read 笑猫日记 by 杨红樱 read in Pleco while looking up words (which was easier for me to read than 天涯客 and helped me build up reading stamina and basic vocabulary a bit), and I read a pingxie fanfic called 寒舍 by 夏灬安兰. I read around 60 chapters of that fanfic, and 30 chapters of 天涯客, over those 6 months. 寒舍 was harder to read than 笑猫日记, but easier than 天涯客, so I would switch between all 3 stories depending on how hard/easy I wanted my reading to be. Eventually 笑猫日记 felt readable without word lookups, so I used 寒舍 as my 'easier' read and 天涯客 (and added 镇魂) as my harder reads. Then 寒舍 became readable without word lookups if I wanted (still had unknown words but they no longer affected my ability to follow the plot and most important details), so 镇魂 became my harder novel to read.
And that's pretty much the strategy I continued to use: I would bounce between a 'easier' novel I could read extensively, a medium difficulty novel I could just look keywords up with (if I didn't feel like looking up a ton of words) to understand, and a 'harder' novel I had to look up words in order to read. Maybe 2 years in (I don't quite remember now), I picked some 'easier' novels from Heavenly Path's recommendations with only 1000-2000 unique words, and read some of them to fill in gaps in my basic vocabulary (so looking up unknown words) and practice extensive reading with some of them. I think that was a really helpful decision, and improved my reading comprehension and stamina a LOT. If I could go back, I would've read a lot more 'easier' 1000-2000 unique word novels before trying to push right into the novels I did. But then, on the other hand? I think pushing right into 'difficult' novels helped me learn vocabulary to read priest's writing in particular, much faster, which was rough going at the start but now pays off because I find that author's stories have more words/phrases/sentence structures I'm comfortable with, and also a decent murder mystery/investigative vocabulary base which is helpful since it's a genre I like reading. Without all the 镇魂 reading I did in the past, I think 破云 would be almost incomprehensible to me. But instead, since I did read those investigative words a lot early on, novels like 默读 and SCI are now 'medium' feeling novels to me, and 破云 is harder but readable if I look words up.