It still feels small, given how much I can tell I'm not grasping.

I'm sure you're aware, but there are significant differences in how language was used in these, compared to modern Mandarin. It's highly compressed and almost all words are a single-character long. (That so many words are two characters now came about because so many sounds were lost in the spoken language and they had to double up with synonyms to be less ambiguous with homonyms.) All by way of saying, these aren't great for learning Mandarin. Spurs to learning hanzi, though, they're good for that.