I believe that to do any sort of skipping around is presumptuous: it presumes that I know better than the author in what order the information, scenes, etc. are best encountered.
I believe that not skipping around would be presumption on the part of the author. Put your book out there, the reader can do whatever he/she likes with the book. Including skip around!
If it’s a really bad book that I wish I hadn’t started and feel like chucking out the window I may skip to the last chapter to give it a last chance.
I did that once this year. The book didn’t get any better but I went back to read the whole thing. Really just made reading it more of a mess.
No, I wouldn’t let them sell you my book if I thought you were going to skip around. (Unless it was a dictionary.)
That’s why authors like Dickens used to release their novels serial-style, a chapter at a time. No skipping ahead in A Tale of Two Cities to find out what happens to Charles Darnay! You have to wait until the rest of the book comes out!
Okay that’s probably not really why he did it.
I never do it.
I read Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich imagining that the Germans would win on penalties…
Are you serious? Wow. I’m a poet and it someone were nuts enough to actually BUY one of my poems I would absolutely positively not care what they did with it. Read it backward, print it on TP and wipe with it, whatever. Once I sold it to you, you are now free to do anything at all except represent that you wrote it.
If someone sells you a painting do they get to tell you where to hang it too?
No, I doubt if he’s completely serious. But are you serious that wouldn’t care how people read your poems?
I have trouble believing that a good poet doesn’t take care about the order of the lines or stanzas in their poem, or that they doesn’t consider the effect their poem is intended to have on the reader.
I do that but not the last page. I’ll give myself a preview of what’s ahead.
If the author wants that much control over how I read, the author can come to my house and read it aloud to me – and then ignore my demands to read the last page first.
Apples and oranges. They can put the book anywhere they want.
I don’t see how it matters if the poet is good or not. Getting torqued up because someone isn’t reading your poem “right” sounds like the mark of an asshole, though.
Who said anything about the poet being torqued? I wasn’t talking about the feelings of the writer/poet/artist, but about writer/poet/artist making the decisions they did so as to maximize the enjoyment of or effect on the reader.
If I were snarky, I’d take a page from The Reader’s Manifesto and say that so much of modern literature is so obsessed with language and lyricism instead of plot that you probably could read the ending first and not ruin any enjoyment in the slightest!
I used to get all caught up in a book, and about a third of the way through, I would carefully paperclip the last chapter. Then I would flip through the pages from the point I left off reading looking for the names of the characters to jump out on me. Without actually reading the page in context, I would know if “Karen” ended up living on the plantation, or if “Griff” came back to play a major part in the plot, or if “Becky Sue” was ever found alive. No details, just wanted to know if the characters were in it to the end.
(well, I guess they would be, the main ones. The interesting minor characters on the edges, they either were or were not so easily dismissed.)
Absolutely. The best stories and poems have a sequence. Events build one upon another, and the ending is meaningless without the resonance of all that precedes. I seldom judge, but inability to deny oneself the temptation of reading ahead strikes me as abjectly immature. If knowing the ending does not spoil the tale, then how much are you getting from it in the first place?
I guess this attitude explains why Hollywood marketing douches feel they can spoil movies in their trailers and not worry about hurting the box office take.l
Put me in the “Hell no!” Category.
Never. Not ever. Not even once!
(And, I’ve lost a little respect for those of you who do. I’m just sayin’!)
Not often, but I have been known to look at the end of a book occasionally. Let’s say that I seldom do it deliberately, but I don’t go out of my way to avoid it either. So, if I’m checking on how many pages there are, I don’t take any special measures to avoid reading what might be on the final page. Nor do I make any particular effort to avoid reviews or discussions that might give away the ending.
I have mixed feelings about the very concept of “spoilers,” to be honest. I’ve always felt that if simply knowing the plot can truly “spoil” a book, then it’s probably not much of a book. That is, it’s a book that has nothing to offer but its plot, and those tend not to be the kind of books I enjoy.
Even in mysteries, which really do kind of depend on keeping things secret from the reader, there is usually something on offer apart from the simple narrative of events in a particular order. It may be interesting characters, it may be beautifully written prose, it may be a depiction of a historical period, it may be descriptions of exotic settings. Whatever it might be, there’s more to a book than simply its plot. The plot is just part of what makes a book work, and in my mind it’s not necessarily the most important part.
Otherwise, the experience of reading a novel could be replicated simply by reading its plot summary on Wikipedia. Or (for an older generation) reading the Cliff Notes. But apart from high school students with a test the next day, no one tries to replace reading books in that way. Reading, in my mind, is a holistic experience, with “what happens next?” being just one element in my enjoyment of a book. YMMV, of course, but I’ve been able to enjoy any number of books even when I know full well how they end before I even look at the first page.
Really, if the only thing a work has going for it is the surprise at the end, then I don’t think it’s really all that great. You read the end, you go oh wow, and that’s it? I don’t think it’s a sign of lack of maturity to expect more from a piece of writing than just a surprise.
Why do so many of you find it immature or childish to know the end or read ahead? I don’t get that connection. I get that you don’t do it that way but what makes you think you’re more mature than those of us who do?
Because for a lot of the responses in this thread, it reads as a lack of self restraint. Several people have said they do that because they need to know if a character they like survives to the end. It’s like something a child would do and it makes me think of a kid who looks for his Christmas presents days early because he can’t wait to get them on Dec 25. They need to know now now now and don’t have the maturity and patience to wait.
So yeah, like elbows said, I too lose a bit of respect for anyone who says they do this.