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The Boston Globe published a piece today that questions that validity of the non-fiction book Bringing Down the House, which inspired the recent hit film 21, starring Kevin Spacey. (I actually just read the book this weekend, and saw the film the weekend before that, but that proves no point other than I have no real social life.)

Both the author, Ben Mezrich, and his editor stand behind his book. However, as with A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences before, such a claim has spurred controversy and many readers are feeling betrayed.

While Sebastian Junger claims doing so is “lying,” on Papercuts. His argument is that “nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is; that’s something else.”

Mezrich ever intended for his book to be educational or representational of “the world as it is.” He tells the Globe that he “took literary license to make it readable.”

The Globe writes that such non-fiction trends are

Much like reality television shows, the shift is fed by the sense that what audiences want is reality, but packaged with an excitement and drama that the original facts lack.

And does anyone get truly angry that The Amazing Race, Survivor and the thousands of other shows like them, play with the idea of “reality”? I know it happens, but never with the vigor as it does in the literary world.

Non-fiction books, like reality television, has a spectrum. Television viewers don’t put the Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV reality shows in the same box. Why are non-fiction books treated differently? What literary high ground exists so that movies and television can take extreme creative liberties with “reality” with relatively little controversy and books cannot?

While publishers and authors should never misrepresent their books (and this is totally the case in some books!), readers need to take greater responsibility in recognizing and understanding why they are reading that particular book. Are you reading it to learn something? Or are you reading it for entertainment value?

Such critical thinking could even inspire greater debate around literature, the media and more.

Image by Falcifer. Licensed via Creative Commons.