Reading consciousness and fetishes - how do we know what we know?

Another day of elliot's not reading - what if we didn't read? how would life be different? Well of course I read all day - emails, messages, news items, ads - by read I mean serious reading and in my case I mean reading fiction. Most of what we read - passive reading, stuff that opens before your eyes and you take it in like you'd take in a tree in front of your face of a cat darting out into the road while you're driving - is informational. And reading fiction is informational, too, but in my view it's informational of a much higher order. If we didn't read or couldn't read our experience of life would be limited to our own immediate perception and cognition. It's been well said that reading is access to the consciousness of the consciousness of another - but few realize how profound that is. We all have the experience of reading books and then forgetting them or so we think - because we think to remember a book is to remember its plot and characters, the factual data, in the way we can recount a story we read in the morning paper, but that's not it at all. Reading fiction is how we know or think we know what it was like to live in a different culture, time, era - and also how we have any idea what it's like to actually be another. Don't we all have a sense of Victorian England, as one example? And isn't this sense entirely fabricated by reading Dickens? When I say Victorian England what comes to your mind and why? Is it even fetishized - maybe you see the orange spine of a Penguin pb?