With such matters as reading for recreation we have nothing to do here. Training for authorship means work, regular work, stiff mental work.
Some amateurs seem to think that a course of desultory dipping into books is a guarantee of literary efficiency, or an indication of literary ability.
"I am never so happy as when I am curled up in an armchair surrounded by books"; or "I do so love to browse among books," girls will tell me, when they are asking if I can find them a post in my office, or on the staff of one of my magazines.
It is so difficult for the uninitiated to understand that the business of writing and making books is one that entails as much close, monotonous work as any other business; and the mere fact that any one spends a certain amount of time in reading a bit here and a bit there, picking up a book for a half-hour's entertainment and throwing it down the minute it ceases to stimulate the curiosity, is no more preparation for literary work than an occasional tinkling at a piano, trying a few bars here and there of chance compositions, would be any preparation for giving a pianoforte recital or composing a sonata.
Nature's Revenge for the Misuse of the Brain
I have nothing to say against dipping into books as a recreation—refreshing one's memory among old friends, or looking for happy discoveries in new-comers—I have passed hosts of pleasant half-hours in this way myself when my brain was too tired to work, and I wanted relaxation. But such reading is not work; neither is it training in any sort of sense—it is merely a pastime; and, as such, must only be taken in moderation. It should be the exception, not a habit.
If you allow yourself to get into this way of haphazard reading, in time you lose the ability to do any consecutive reading, and, as a natural consequence, it would be utterly impossible for you to do any consecutive thinking,—an essential for connected writing.
The reason for this is quite clear, if you think it over. When you persistently skim a legion of books, or dip into them casually, and live mentally on a diet of snippets—a form of reading that has been the vogue of late years—you are giving yourself mental indigestion that is wonderfully akin to the indigestion that would follow a food diet on similar lines. If your meals always consisted of snacks taken at all sorts of odd times—fried fish followed by rich chocolates, with a nibble at a mince tart, a few spoonfuls of preserved ginger, a trifle of roast duck, some macaroni cheese, a little salmon and cucumber, some grouse, oyster patties, and ice-cream on top of that—your stomach wouldn't know what to do with it all, and—— I need say no more about it!
In the same way, when you read first one thing and then another, piling poems on love scenes, then adding a motley, disconnected selection of scraps of information (of doubtful use in most cases) with sensational episodes and pessimistic outpourings, irrespective of any sort of sequence or logical connection, your mind doesn't know what to do with the conglomeration; for no sooner has your thinking machine set one series of thoughts in motion, than it has to switch off that current and start on something else. Eventually the brain gives up the struggle; the thoughts cease to work; you lose the power to remember—much less to assimilate—what you read.
In the end, you can't read! Nature is bound to take this course in sheer self-defence; the only alternative would be lunacy!