Loading Channel Entries in the backend (programmatically) rather than in views

Is there a clean and easy way to load channel entries within an accessory, extension or module? I’ve figured out how to create views with exp:channel:entries tags and render the output to a variable, but haven’t found the correct way to load them in the backend for iterating. Hopefully whichever method is used to load channel entries can also be used to update or delete them.

I’ve looked at the Channel Entries API methods, which is lacking ‘load’, and I’ve tried loading the channel entry models but they seem to lack the custom fields that a channel is made up of.