Before I begin, I will say that I am scheduled to take Step 2-CK in August, thus have not experienced the exam yet. That said, I think the Kaplan books are too long! Unless you have a lot of dedicated free time, reading them is very tedious and it would be hard to maintain focus for such a long time! Especially since a good amount of most peoples' studying focuses on questions so, even after all this reading, you'd have to spend a lot of time on questions. I feel like, when I read the Kaplan books, I'm kind of skimming the body of the text to focus on the few key words/phrases/sentences. The books just seem extremely low-yield, in the sense that they would take an insane amount of time to master. Mastering them would take time away from questions, other sources of information, etc. The general consenses seems to be that one should focus on a concise review book (i.e. Secrets/Crush or First Aid), read that many times and do a lot of questions, while reviewing the explanations in detail. I can think of more people recommending Secrets/Crush than First Aid, but there are people in both categories. I would not recommend continuing with Kaplan. Good luck!
