Recently, a colleague mentioned that she had been rereading Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” which was first published in 1929 and is about a group of creepy little kids who become the unwanted wards of sad, listless pirates. She praised it, and her recommendation sent me to Amazon. The title was familiar, as was the vibrant cover of the New York Review Books reissue. One cent and $3.99 for shipping, and the book was on its way. A couple of weeks later, I opened to the first page and started reading. By the fifth page, I realized that I had read this novel before, and pretty recently, about three years ago, when another colleague had also praised it and lent me his copy.

The passage that tipped me off is about the children’s pet cat, called Tabby, who has a penchant for “mortal sport” with snakes:

Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

Tabby’s name stood out, as did the creature’s particular daring, and I had the strange sense of already knowing that the poor thing was doomed to a gruesome and shocking end: hunted and murdered by a pack of wild cats, some pages later—by which time I was marvelling both at the various peculiarities of the book and at my unsettling ability to forget them.

This passage is also characteristic of the novel more generally. Its detached and slightly sadistic sense of the animal world is a prelude to all kinds of violence and injury that befall the book’s pets and wild things. The phrase “probably ate something” is oddly fuzzy, the kind of imprecise notion that a child might have about what cats do when they are unwatched. This kind of language communicates a lazy innocence mixed with vague malevolence that gives Hughes’s sense of childhood its special character. “Cock-a-hoop” is a great old idiomatic phrase—meaning in this case exulting or boastful—just one of dozens of such sparklers that flash from the pages.

All of which is to say that “A High Wind in Jamaica” is remarkable in all kinds of ways—in its diction, its syntax, its characterization, its imagery, its psychological depth, and its narrative movement. It opens with a hurricane in Jamaica, which precipitates the decision by a colonial family to send its children to the safer haven of England for school. En route, they fall in with those pirates, captained by an odd Dutchman named Jonsen. The children are, mostly, better off for their adventure; Jonsen and his men, less so. The book deconstructs the pirate fable—but is still, at points, a ripping yarn itself—and, as Francine Prose notes in her introduction, it is an altogether more sophisticated and subtle version of “The Lord of the Flies,” which was published twenty-five years later. It is, simply, entirely memorable, which makes the fact that I forgot it so thoroughly all the more difficult to account for.

It’s a bit circular but I cannot recall forgetting another novel entirely—both the contents of the book and the act of reading it. Others may be out there, lurking, waiting to spring up and surprise and dishearten. But, looking at my bookshelves, I am aware of another kind of forgetting—the spines look familiar; the names and titles bring to mind perhaps a character name, a turn of plot, often just a mood or feeling—but for the most part, the assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast catalogue of forgetting.

This forgetting has serious consequences—but it has superficial ones as well, mostly having to do with vanity. It has led, at times, to a discomfiting situation, call it the Cocktail Party Trap (though this suggests that I go to many cocktail parties, which is itself a fib). Someone mentions a book with some cachet that I’ve read—a lesser-known work of a celebrated writer, say Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda,” to take an example from my shelf—and I smile knowingly, and maybe add, “It’s wonderful,” or some such thing. Great so far, I’m part of the in-crowd—and not lying; I did read it. But then there’s a moment of terror: What if the person summons up a question or comment with any kind of specificity at all? Basically, what if she aims to do anything other than merely brag about having read “Daniel Deronda”? Uh-oh. It’s about cotton production, right? Maybe blurt something about that. No, wait, that’s Gaskell’s “North and South.” I must either vaguely agree with what she says, hoping she isn’t somehow putting me on or lying herself, or else confess everything, with some version of the conversation killer: “I read that entire novel and now can tell you nothing of any consequence about it.” Or else slink away, muttering about needing to refill a drink.

This embarrassing situation raises practical questions that also become ones about identity: Do I really like reading? Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?

Perhaps, though there is comfort to be had. In April, on a post by Brad Leithauser about the surprising durability of certain seemingly disposable words (involuntary memory, essentially), a reader left a quotation in the comments, which he attributed to the poet Siegfried Sassoon: