Reading usually means fiction

Many words have narrowed under the radar, in certain usages.

John McWhorter, Words on the Move

Reading challenges you to figure out what kind of person you want to be.

Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

John McWhorter

What Will Schwalbe says in that second quotation illustrates what John McWhorter says in the first. McWhorter's point is that some words narrow in meaning. The word music, for example, means only classical music in some usages by some people. A drink may refer only to alcohol, not diet soda or even water. Centuries ago, meat referred to food of all kinds. That word narrowed to mean only, or mostly, animal flesh.

In that line from Books for Living, Schwalbe is referring to fiction when he uses the word reading. "Fiction opens us up," he says later in the same chapter. Reading fiction reveals who we really are, what we really believe.

McWhorter writes, "Today's discussions about the value of 'reading' presuppose that the topic is fiction." When you are asked what good books you have read lately, chances are the other person's interest is in what novel you have enjoyed, not that book you read about butterflies or that excellent biography of Winston Churchill.

Will Schwalbe

The Great American Read, the PBS series last year aimed at discovering Americans' favorite book, focused on fiction.

Similarly the word literature narrowly refers to either fiction or poetry in most instances. When I was in college, though a journalism major, I managed to take one literature course each semester. The only nonfiction I can remember reading for a class was Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and some essays by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then there was that Bible as Literature class I mentioned recently. For the most part, however, literature meant fiction, and for the most part, that's what it usually means today.