This. I peaked at about 1000 kanji in active memory. It was still not enough to read newspapers easily. Joyo kanji ("regular use Chinese characters") have about 2100 characters, which any high school grad should be able to read. Anything much below that level and you are guessing/looking up a lot of content.

You are better off trying to cover specific domains. I was able to read technical articles related to hardware and software topics pretty easily.