kanjii, where and how to learn it.

hey /lang/, I've mastered hirigana and katakana, and now it's time to move on, but where does one start when there are 50,000+ words to learn?  can anyone give me any tips/links?

I'm using the げんき series of books for learning japanese. Associated with each lesson are 15 or so kanji. The two books total up to 317 kanji. I have another book that is nothing but kanji - 2000 of them. It also mentions WHY the symbol is like it is (for example: It mentions that 本 is "line at the base of a tree trunk")