What the Hell is Reworking?

Today's Times has an article about the Dan Brown trial in the UK. (Disclosure: I still haven't read The Da Vinci Code all the way through. After two attempts, I just couldn't get past the leaden prose.) Before the trial started, I had assumed that the trial was just proof that Brown had gotten rich and famous enough to draw lawsuits. It happens. But the lede bothers me:

On his third day of testimony in a London court yesterday, Dan Brown acknowledged "reworking" passages from another book for his best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code," but rejected charges that he stole key ideas for his thriller ...

The word is stripped of all meaningful context, but "reworking," to me, sounds like someone took a nonfiction passage, wrote it down, and then, instead of treating it as research notes, revised it until it fit into their work. "Drew on," "relied on," "read," all stuff I could see an author doing while researching something. But "reworked," that sounds like it's getting dangerously close to plagiarism.

Brown's former publisher apparently defended the book by calling it a "romping piece of good fiction," which sounds more like ad copy than a cogent response. ("You reworked my passages!" "Yes, but now they romp.")

Next entry: something not from the New York Times Books section.