How do you read a novel in a foreign language without stopping at every word?
The standard advice is to pick books slightly above your level and infer unknown words from context. That works, but it quietly assumes looking a word up is expensive. Change that assumption and the calculation changes with it.
What actually determines whether you can read a harder book is the cost of one lookup. At fifteen seconds you will stop bothering after a page and drift; at two seconds you can afford to look up a quarter of the words and still follow the story. Optimise the lookup before you optimise the difficulty of the text.
For paper, that means not typing. A camera dictionary — Booktionary works this way, holding the phone over the word — removes the switching and the spelling. For ebooks, an e-reader's built-in dictionary already does it.
Graded readers and bilingual editions are the other route. They work well early on, and most learners find the benefit tails off around B2, when real books become reachable.