Francis Spufford sounds like Alissa Quart, who wrote Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, in that he uses himself for data more than anecdote. I like the metaphors he uses broadly to divide childhood reading, from earliest reading through to YA: the Forest, the Island, the Town, the Hole.
He made me laugh once. More than Middle Earth, more than EarthSea, more than the Little House, when he was a child he wanted to live in Narnia (in his Island period). Later, when he "began to read one-handedly," books like Emmanuelle seemed to have as as their motto "Farther up and farther in!"