For those of you who use Genki, when did you start reading?

I've been doing Anki and WaniKani for close to a year at this point and picked up Genki 1 about a month ago. I'm only on Lesson 3 but was curious if I need to do all 24 over the course of both books before really getting started on reading. Pretty much all of the stuff I've looked at to read seems above my level even the super basic stuff.