Among my obsessions I include cows, pencils and all things Greek, and I count myself lucky to have been able to write for publication about two of these things. I used to think it was self-indulgent or shameful to write about my private passions, but then I realized that as a reader I loved learning about other writers’ obsessions. I think of reading John McPhee on fishing for golf balls, or Ian Frazier on bears, or John Waters on his childhood fixation with car accidents. “I tremble to think how boring my life would be without the throbbing existence of violence always surrounding me,” he writes in “Shock Value.” Geoff Dyer, in “Out of Sheer Rage,” circles his effort to write “a sober, academic study of D. H. Lawrence” — or maybe he wanted to write a novel about this writer who made him want to become a writer. He travels to Taormina (where Lawrence lived briefly); to Eastwood, in England (to visit the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum and Gift Shop, an episode that unravels into a description of his mother’s jigsaw-puzzle technique); to Oxford (“or Dullford”); and to Oaxaca, where, he writes, “I sniffed around the city a little but my heart wasn’t in it. … Maybe those are the words that should be on my grave: ‘His heart wasn’t in it.’” He ends up writing the best book ever written about not writing a book about D. H. Lawrence.

I don’t read many detective novels these days — I’m saving them, and crossword puzzles, for my old age — but the Commissario Brunetti series by Donna Leon, originally of Montclair, N.J., is irresistible for its setting in her adopted city of Venice. Surely she invented Brunetti and follows him from case to case (and meal to meal, and bar to bar) so that she has an excuse to explore Venice and practice a livelihood that allows her to keep living there.

Herman Melville not only harnessed his obsession with the sea in his early books “Typee,” “Omoo” and “White-Jacket” (all set aboard ship or on remote islands) but managed to make obsession itself his subject in “Moby-Dick,” a book I’m not alone in being obsessed with. I’m not the only one who owns multiple copies of “Moby-Dick,” with and without the hyphen. Melville has even generated fan fiction: See “The Whale: A Love Story.”

Reading takes us places, and reading about someone’s obsessions can be catching. Thanks to Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury was my first destination in London. Vladimir Nabokov gave me a taste for endnotes and butterflies (though some of his other obsessions might be better left unexplored). Reading Janet Malcolm sent me off into Freud and increased my holdings of Sylvia Plath, even unto a memoir of Ted Hughes by his brother, Gerald. One year, I set out to be a Philip Roth completist, and “Exit Ghost” sent me back to “The Ghost Writer” and all the Zuckerman books in between. In “The Ghost Writer,” Zuckerman visits the eminent writer E. I. Lonoff in Connecticut and gets snowed in. He fantasizes that Lonoff’s protégée, Amy Bellette, is really Anne Frank, who has survived the war but must live under an assumed name, because the fact of her survival would undermine her posthumous literary success. On a trip to Amsterdam, I visited the Anne Frank House and bought a paperback copy of the diary, which I read in bed at a hotel on the site of a hotel that Anne records being bombed by the British during the night of April 26, 1943. I felt a connection to Anne through Zuckerman’s obsession with Amy Bellette, which was born of Roth’s need to write about Jewishness. It was as if Roth and I had met over something, shared something, were warming our hands together over the same fire.