Tsumego isn't the only way to improve your reading. You can get reading or visualizing practice everywhere in Go, be it actual games, reviews, studying professional games, watching other peoples play, even in counting. But in my experience the biggest obstacle is to actually bother to read in a game and to act on the result. In my opinion most important is to rely on your reading - so if you read you can capture the cutting stone, don't defend against the non-working cut, if you read that you can kill, please do so, check your ladders - by reading them, if you read that a move on a particular spot devastates your position please defend, if you read that the ko-threat your opponent played doesn't threaten anything don't answer etc. etc.
If people chided you for not doing any reading it might be this what they meant not your problem solving capacity.