Reading 活着 as first book, need some flashcard advice

How do you choose which words to memorize when reading a book?

I've been studying Chinese for about a year now, and am starting to read 活着. I know ~2000 words after studying about an hour a day with flashcards -- basically partway through HSK5.

I frankly wish I had started reading the book earlier, because although I can handle the HSK flashcard grind, I'm realizing words are significantly more concrete when I have a sentence to associate with them (instead of basically choosing a meaning at random to attach to -- hello there, 使).

I am learning Mandarin primarily so I can read books and news; I'm not too concerned with speaking or listening at the moment. I expect to get a lot of benefit out of reading 活着, it seems interesting and not so difficult (the toughest part so far has been the foreword, lol), and will hopefully let me shore up my grammar passively.

I understand Mandarin is a marathon, and my vocabulary growth is quite strongly related to the hours I put in, which will always be limited. But I'm kind of a perfectionist, and it hurts a little to pass up a word, even if I know it is repeated only once, or for example is not an HSK word. How should I decide what words to memorize and what not?

I extracted all the words from 活着 that I have not already learned. Of those that I could easily find a definition, 1712 are repeated at least once in the book (singletons), and 2508 are not. An optimistic estimate of my learning rate is 10 words / day.

That means if I want to be exposed to a word before reading it in the book, it would take me 6 months to read the book if I only study the repeated words, and 14 months if I memorize them all. Assuming the flashcards are setting my pace. I'm using Pleco, so it's not horrible to encounter a word I haven't studied yet, just a little jarring.

Should I skip studying singleton words, and just expect to maybe pick them up on a re-reading? Is 14 months not a bad timeframe for reading a book this way? I'm not really dying to get to another book / resource; except maybe 三体 I've got nowhere to go next. Maybe that's fine?

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