Novel and Not Novel

Day 282 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and one hopes that plenty of ISU journalism students are reading The Death and Life of American Journalism, by Robert McChesney and John Nichols, because McChesney just spoke there, as I read this morning in the Daily Vidette.

One thing that troubles me is that the student staff writer called his book a "novel."  It isn't a novel.  It's non-fiction.  It's about journalism.  Its death...and life.

This kind of thing also troubled me quite a bit when I was a college teacher, students coming to college, after high school, after 12 full years of schooling, not knowing what the words "fiction" and "non-fiction" mean.  Happens quite a bit in the bookstore, too.

Fiction is made up.  Non-fiction isn't; it's factual.

A novel is fiction.

I do get the blur and the irony here, and out there in the world. Even in the world of "news."  Sigh....

Not to dwell on this so long that it bogs me down, I am just going to delight myself with all the books that have "the death and life of" something in the title:

The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by Diane Ravitch. Ouch. Actually, just a couple months ago, I chatted with a woman reading this at a little table on the sidewalk in front of the coffeehouse....

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs.

The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, by Ben Sherwood. Baseball, brotherly love, now a major motion picture.

The Death and Life of Malcolm X by Peter Goldman.

OK, that's enough.  I've gone beyond delight.  But, wait!  What about The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch, by James L. Rosenberg, a play?!  That's delightful.  In the long ago past, I played a saloon girl in a yellow dress in that play, recalling Gunsmoke on tv in my childhood.....