[Nyororin]

I am one of those against the Heisig method in every way and have never seen work in a real life situation. Tons of people will toss out the number of kanji they know, and the list of them, etc... But I have yet to see someone actually reading properly rather than just pointing out and telling the meaning.
I am sure there are people out there who have done it, but they are in a serious minority. I think the method remains popular not because it works well as a way to actually learn Japanese for use, but rather because it can give the illusion of knowing a lot more than is true for those self studying.

I would say that I learned most of the kanji and vocabulary learned through kanji (in contrast to the vocab learned through interaction) by reading.
While more serious and famous novels are good, I really would not recommend them to an early learner. Famous authors are famous because of their writing style, and often that includes stylistic elements that can be very hard to understand. It really sucks to read a passage, know what it means technically, but to have it go over your head because you don't "get" it in context.

My recommendation for earlier reading would be fairly simple light novels. Sure, they aren't high literature, but the majority are written with a younger reader in mind and are designed to be clear and keep the reader interested in the story. Deeper stuff can come later when less will be flying over your head.
I made the mistake of reading the 十二国記 series before I was ready for it, and while I learned a lot of new stuff in the process and *thought* that I got the majority of it... Reading it again later was like reading a completely different novel as I had missed out on so much the first time. I was lucky to understand what I did - a little less and I would have probably lost interest and not bothered reading it at all. (And in reality, I ended up dropping reading it the first time through once it got into heavy political talk as too much went over my head to follow it at all after a certain point.)

Too much frustration is fatal, so try to find something that will do its very best to keep your interest.