If you can read you can perform magic and transport yourself to every country in the world, or change into an animal, or suddenly be in a different era from the one you're living in. You can travel as you please, as if there were no fences or borders or walls to stop you, you don't get arrested, locked up or shot, and if you don't like the era you happen to be living in you can simply go back to another one, although I didn't especially want to go back to the era before I was born because I would have ended up bang in the middle of the war. But if you can read you can go everywhere, even into the future.