You summarize very well exactly what I felt from the article. I sometimes feel the metaphor goes the other way, that is, when I seriously read a literature (in my case, it's often a play) I feel like I'm "decoding" it.
Absofulukingtely. Litterature is like code, can be pretty obvious and linear and you just read it, or it can be deeply intelligent and you decode it, ponder over what it implies and what it assumes.