It’s fiction. It says so right on the spine of the book, above the title, The Da Vinci Code.

It’s meant to be nothing more than a good read that causes you to pause occasionally after reading a passage and think, “gee, I should take another look at that masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci.”

Why is it that anytime a good read is published, there’s an outcry that the book is going to destroy our faith, encourage bad behavior or corrupt us in other ways. The latest is The Da Vinci Code. Before that it was the Harry Potter series and Harry Potter was preceded by To Kill a Mockingbird and C.S. Lewis books. Fiction is a great escape — transporting the reader to other lands and lives – until marketing muddies the water.

Positive word-of-mouth marketing can land a book on The New York Times bestseller list and get it adopted as a must-read for book clubs. Equally positive (or negative, as is the case here) grassroots advocacy can cause a book to be bashed from the pulpit and on the op-ed pages of the national and local newspapers. The positive buzz can quickly turn to negative and confuse fiction with fact.

The fact is … it’s fiction … fiction that has encouraged people to turn away from the TV and turn another page in the book. It’s fiction that has encouraged lunchroom discussions among co-workers and conversations with friends and family. That’s what a good read is all about.