NOT long ago I had to be treated for a retinal tear. My eye doctor says this could have happened at just about any time and was most likely the result of nothing more than middle age, but I think he’s wrong. I’m pretty sure I tore my retina from reading too much.

I should explain that I’ve always been a heavy-duty reader, starting in third grade, when I discovered that my local public library would let me go home with five books and then give me five more as soon as I brought the first bunch back. For years I made my living as an editor — as a reader, essentially — and I used to unwind from a day of reading at the office by reading some more at home. There were stretches when I was probably averaging close to a book a day.

This year, however, I agreed to be a judge for the National Book Awards, and a day when I got through only a single book felt like a day of delinquency. I was a fiction judge, and there were 407 nominees in that category. (It could have been worse: There were some 500 nonfiction nominees.) All these books had to be read in the space of just a few months: from May, when the nominees started trickling in — the deadline for publishers to declare their candidates was June 3 — through the flood tide of July, and into the beginning of September, when we judges were expected to announce a long list of 10 prize-worthy books before winnowing that down to five finalists, and then a single winner, which was announced on Nov. 20.

No one goes into this thinking it’s going to be easy. You do it because it’s an honor to be asked, and for the same reason you agree to go on jury duty: It’s a cultural obligation of sorts. But even veterans of the judging process can’t really prepare you. To begin with, where do you keep 407 books? For a while I stacked them in various rooms, ziggurats and stalagmites of books, until my wife, not unreasonably, complained that the place was beginning to look like a thrift shop. Then I bought a couple of cheapo bookcases — the kind made of compressed sawdust veneered in adhesive paper printed to look like wood. I installed them in the garage and carefully arranged my books in alphabetical order, only to discover a couple of days later that the shelves had collapsed under the weight, leaving the books in a spread-eagle heap.