Who reads words, reads literature, or reads the world?

Jonathan Raban describes (LRB 5 Nov 09) lovingly how his mother taught him to read words: "I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap."

As a bus conductor on a slow route in the 1950s, he read William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity: "Looking at the book now still brings back the old-bus smell of cigarettes, fish and chips, sweat, Polo mints, and ineffectual disinfectant. . . . Every piece of writing was like a pond, sunlit, overhung by willows, with clustering water lilies, and, perhaps, the rippling circle made by a fish rising to snatch a dying fly. This much could be seen and appreciated by any passing hiker. But the true life of pond lay below the surface, in deep water where only the attentive and experienced eye would detect the suspended clouds of midge larvae, the submarine shadow of the cruising pike, the exploding shoal of bug-eyed small fry."

Since then, Raban has made his living reading books and reading the world: "Trying to understand the habitat in which we live requires an ability to read it . . . Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming the place as their own, and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand for ever. Later over-writing has obscured all but a few, incompletely erased fragments of the earliest entries, but one can still pick out a phrase here, a word there, and see how the most recently dried layer of scribble is already being partially effaced by fresh ink."