This paper looks at reading in foreign languages from the place that textbooks of Spanish as a foreign language attribute to literature, especially through the narrative genre. Interpretation and translation are part of the aspects focused on. Two processes, the one of learning and the one of reading, are included within the link between literature and learning. That is because the premise of this paper is that the mother tongue is constituent of the process of foreign language learning. The ideological components of language play a definite role in it.