Can books make you fluent? StoryLearning review & alternatives

I like Lingq but watch out if you are learning Brazilian Portuguese, at least the news. I have had Brazilians tell me most of that content is lazily translated and NOT grammatically correct generally. So yeah it is not great for nailing proper grammar for things like would live, would like, etc. I suppose you could use the ref. but it doesn't help when some of the reading material is off.
I have supplemented with Pimsleur even now knowing a lot of vocab. I am near the end of level 4 and introducing in the woulds in general till later and just letting me notice the simple modifiers has helped. The simple notes help too.

Yeah, Olly once made and video or podcast that talked about many of the issues you raised. If I recall correctly, he said that the story learning method does not purport to be a complete method. Nor is any resource going to teach you everything. It’s also not designed for complete beginners, although some of his more expensive courses he offers might be. He does offer some listening courses, as well, which I think are pretty good, but also quite pricey. I think there’s some value in his relatively cheap short story books, but the expensive courses I would not buy, especially for really commonly studied languages like French or Spanish. I have never found any app or book will fully prepare you for speaking with a real person, but they usually can help somewhat by helping to familiarize you with words, sentence patterns, and collocations that might appear or you might need to use.

I've been in a German reading group since early Covid, and it's really fun for learning new vocab, turns of phrase and idioms (or, to when some particularly clever writing is encountered). We've been tackling 'Der Hobbit: Oder Hin & Zurück' most recently. It's been utterly fascinating, terrifying and rewarding to read. Easily the hardest of any of the book's we've read, but probably the most interesting translation, as a lot of the words used are the more poetic / florid varieties. Or for realizing that e.g. the trolls speak with a more colloquial / uncouth tone (from word & idiom choice) than other characters. Interesting as all hell but, as you said, definitely not something that might make one fluent. It's the trying to summarize the readings with others, in one's own words, that is really what's helped comfort & fluency.

"you don't realize you're learning because you're so invested in the story" is such a lie and is what the whole thing is based upon.

Maybe it's a realistic claim when you're reading a story in your own native language as a kid, and you pick up words through context. But not the case with language, for the same reason why you can't "get invested in the story" with a Spanish tv show as a Spanish beginner.

I am trying to figure out what people consider to be fun on this course. I love stories but the 15 minutes long videos just telling bunch of vocab and grammar gives me boring school class vibes. Really, I feel like I'm going to fall asleep while that.

I am learning Latin and my only goal is to eventually read latin texts for fun and this method has been great

I like the concept of learning by reading because I love to read and that is usually my main goal of studying languages. That said, I don’t like that the StoryLearning stories are the same, or very nearly the same, for all the languages I have used them for. I think this gives a false sense of accomplishment because you’re already familiar with the story which then makes it harder to get to full comprehension of the individual words. Otherwise, it’s great. LingQ is great too! Thank you for your frank discussion of this subject.