It’s hard to tell this story without sounding pretentious, but here goes. Not too long ago, I reached for my old copy of “The Brothers Karamazov.” (I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the Grand Inquisitor sequence.) Opening the pages, I was startled to see a tiny rivulet of sand spill out. I could be even more pretentious and call the moment Proustian, because in the next second, I was lofted back over a span of decades to the place where I first read that book.

It was a beach in Duck, N.C., where my mother liked to rent a house every summer. Like many other English people I’ve met, she welcomed unfiltered sunshine wherever she could find it, and I was happy to go along because, more than the ocean or the salt air, I was drawn to the emptiness, which I knew I would be able to fill with reading.

By then I’d ventured into some approximation of post-collegiate adulthood, and it had dawned on me that reading was no longer a thing the world rewarded. It had to be carried out on the bounce, on the sly, when the day’s drudgery was done or before it had begun. So a week at the beach was the kind of gift I was in no mood to squander. I can still see myself, collapsed in a folding chair beneath a rented beach umbrella. Every part of me is covered or lotioned up (half-English kids burn easy) except for my feet, which are buried in the sand.

I was in a family that valued the written word, which meant that nobody bothered me or expected me to do anything other than what I was doing. The hours didn’t so much fly by as condense into a tidal pool. And it was precisely because I’d been given this expanse of freedom that I couldn’t see spending it on what are normally called “summer books.” This wasn’t snobbery: I was a way-back lover of mysteries and thrillers, which I read and enjoyed throughout the year. But where else would I have the leisure to read, yes, “The Brothers Karamazov”? Or “The Magic Mountain,” “Invisible Man,” “Lord Jim,” “Wuthering Heights” or “Sense and Sensibility”?

It had to be summer because that was the only route to immersion. When I learned, for instance, that I had two months after my college graduation to be idle, I didn’t lounge by a pool — I started reading Henry James and kept reading. “The American,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Bostonians,” “The Golden Bowl”: I plowed through them like sandcastles. The more byzantine James’s syntax grew, the harder I pushed, because I had never encountered a sensibility of such infinite subtlety and nuance.

I suppose you’d call all these books warhorses now, or else tokens of overstriving, but when I think back to that ardent young man, I don’t believe he was trying to impress anybody. He was operating on the assumption that had driven him since childhood, that people out there knew things, and if he wanted to know them, too, he had to come knocking.

The future, which once seemed an endless plain of possibility, is now a peninsula. So many things have changed, including my relationship to the written word. I couldn’t possibly sit down today and read — or do anything — for six consecutive hours. Books are now inseparably tied to my work. When I’m not reading for research, I’m reading for a review or a writer’s workshop or some other professional obligation. Now and again a book fills me with the old engine roar of wonder — I cherish that — but even then, I’m still, consciously or unconsciously, poking under the hood to see how it’s happening. The authorial eye never relaxes. In my mind, I edit the instructions on shampoo bottles.