So here's my strategy for learning French:
Took 4 years in high school, so I already know the basics and a lot of vocabulary.
Memorize ~2000 new nouns and ~2000 new verbs, thus expanding vocabulary and enabling myself to read without having to look up every single word I come across.
Read regularly to embed grammar patterns into my mind while learning new words and expressions.
Watch news and movies to perfect pronunciation and get used to aurally parsing French speech.
So here's my dilemma. I'm heading towards completion of step 2 and I'm preparing for step 3. But the thing is, all books and newspapers in French are written with the literary tenses. Which are perfectly important for learning to read in French! Great! But I'd like to be able to speak and communicate first, which means I'd like to get used to normal tenses, which means I'd like to find reading material that uses the normal tenses instead of the literary ones. You could advise me to listen to things for this instead of reading, but I learn best by seeing words on a page, and if I try to listen to movies/news/radio in French and try to comprehend it before I've seen it written down and gotten used to it that way, it will be MUCH more difficult for me.
So does such reading material exist, and if so, where can I find it?