As I read this thread, it amuses me to realize that the literary criticism and theory which I enjoy reading is a non-fiction which takes fiction as its subject: Umberto Eco's "On Literature" and Kundera's "Art of the Novel" and even, in its own way, Hemingway's "Moveable Feast". Biographies and autobiographies of the lives of novelists and poets is another example of non-fiction which gives us more insight into the world of fiction.
For me, the study of comparative religions is exciting. I imagine it to be similar to the chess enthusiast who studies hundreds of classic games.
Someone, in an IRC chat on philosophy, once asked where one might see compassion in the works of Camus. I expanded the question's scope to seek compassion in the history of philosophy. My search paused when I considered Plato's cave analogy in the Republic. That one person who frees himself from the chains of illusion, and escapes the cave into the light of day, feels compassion for those who remain in bondage, and returns to somehow effect their release. How similar this is to a bodhisattva, who intentionally retains some flaws so as not to escape the cycle of rebirth and enter Nibbana, but to be reborn once again into the world to aid all suffering sentient beings.
Consider the drama of a paragraph from one of Jefferson's letters to a friend, where he says "Just as no two people have the same face, likewise, no two people have exactly the same understanding of their religion." Hence, one billion Roman Catholics, means one billion shades of Catholicism, like some vast spiritual kaleidoscope.
Or, consider the drama for me, to find a passage in The Book of Revelation, which hints of the very pantheism which Christianity condemned, in Chapter 7, verses 15-17: "Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them ...."
The essential quality of such personal, subjective interpretation and deconstruction or analysis is that it becomes mine, my discovery and insight, and is no longer a passive experience but an active one, where I am the doer and not simply the observer.
But then, such experiences require much labor and preparation. Whenever we actively experience fiction, as opposed to being a spectator passively beholding, then the product of our experience, our insight, becomes non-fiction.
This reminds me of the opening pages of Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", describing the irony of human freedom, that we are free to do anything except relinquish our freedom, since the relinquishing of freedom requires a ceaseless exercise of freedom.
So, as the particular kind of reader that I am, I convert fiction into fact, and I convert fact into drama. A reader may be a kind of machine in these respects.