It gets better, but learning vocabulary at that level is going to feel very slow no matter what. I would recommend keeping a fairly low bar for just ignoring words and moving on, as keeping up the reading habit is by far the most useful. If reading feels tedious it's easy to lose interest.
One to two new words per page sounds high enough where you are bound to get repetition, so you may want to only look up words that seem either important for context or familiar (i.e. feels like something you've seen before) to get the most value. I combine that with spaced repetition (Anki) for words that I seem to look up often, but Anki has a bit of a learning curve so it may or may not suite you.
If nothing else though, Argo Tuulik's blog post for Summer Eternal is worth a read. I love his writing style, and that post is unreasonably funny to me, but you can still tell there is a lot of meaning behind what he says. I suppose things hit hardest when presented in ridiculous over the top metaphor.