Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,
There is a symbolic link in a folder. I would like to read destination of this link and get base name of pointed file. Let's say, there is symlink : symlink -> ../file.txt.

I can do that what I want by this script:
readlink symlink | while read var
do
echo `basename $var`
done

but question is - is there possibility to return value from first pipe (readlink symlink) to second pipe for example : readlink symlink | basename $var~ ?

Best wishes

Code:

$ basename $( readlink symlink )
$ basename `readlink symlink`