The case for never reading the book jacket

>What i really really hate is "a book with a plot twist in the end that'll make you reread the whole book again!" ... why do I need to know that there will be a plot twist?

obviously book jackets exist for marketing purposes, I'm supposing there is a market of people who like to know that there will be a tricky plot twist so they can see if they can guess.

I think a movie trailer should be a mini-prequel to the movie, with no footage from the movie itself.

I don't watch movie trailers anymore, maybe it's nostalgia but nowadays they are absolutely awful and full of spoilers, as if spoilers were a feature and not a bug. I guess it has something to do with how the movies themselves are put together. The use of stupid plot mechanisms such as "multiple dimensions" to be able to kill a character and then revive them again, or use multiple disposable versions of the same character for a few minutes at a time, etc. I guess if you don't care about such blatant cheating in the movie itself you won't mind a bad trailer.

That said, my approach nowadays is to consider watching a movie as a kind of risk-taking. I watch the movie without knowing or expecting anything; sometimes it will be worth it, sometimes it won't, but when it is, then DAMN is it worth it! On the other hand, if I watch the trailer then I know for sure that it will not happen. So... I take the risk.

That can be solved by reading it after reading the book instead of before.

Things like that is why I too always tried to avoid reading back covers or jackets. Way too often they reveal crucial parts about the story. Spoiling Ender's Game makes reading the book 90% pointless.

I also avoid film trailers like the plague, except for pure zero-content entertainment and visuals-only stuff like Marvel movies (to the extent I even bother with them anymore). Every other type of trailer I block or avoid watching. One problem I remember having with British TV series, in particular Doctor Who, is that they would spoil the next episode by showing a trailer of it in the previous one. In the end it made me stop watching it altogether.

For books of (to me) unknown authors I'll read the first couple of pages, that'll quickly reveal if they're of the "show" or "tell" type of authors, and other things about their writing style. Other than that I'll try to skim the headline of the summary but avoiding reading more than the bare minimum to get an idea about what it's about but nothing more. Sometimes I read books completely without any idea about what's it going to be about.

Ender's Game was the first twist that really "got" me as a kid. Ignited my love of scifi for sure.

I went to Amazon to read the description just now, and it doesn't really give anything away that isn't in the opening chapters, which hopefully means they changed the cover from what you saw.

I'm on the other side of the scale, I don't want to know anything about a book or movie. I often don't even look at the posters, never mind trailers. I just need the genre of a book and to know if it's good.

The reason is just that I want to go in surprised. Very often I've read books or watched movies that I probably wouldn't've because I thought "that story is dumb" or "that setting isn't for me". I don't want to read a book and think "When do we get there?". I've even disabled the progress display on my Kindle because I don't want to know if what I'm currently reading is still set-up or the grand finale. If I know a thriller has 100 pages left when the murder has been found I know that something is still going to happen and that affects how I read the rest.

It may have to do with how much you like being surprised and why you read a book. If it's for the prose then the surprise doesn't matter. If you enjoy a story well told then the surprise doesn't matter. But I like being surprised and going into it without any bias and as little prior knowledge as possible.

If I know the key cliffhanger or major plot point in a book, I don’t even bother reading it. I can also never really read a book or watch a movie/series more than once.

I used to often flip to the end of the book when I was in the middle of reading it, just to get the answer to some question that I knew wouldn't be resolved for a while. I wouldn't do that with mystery novels, but otherwise yeah spoilers have never bothered me.

But I'm someone who has re-read favorite novels dozens of times, which I suppose is about appreciating great writing.

For me it takes away from the dopamine of the situation.

If I'm not predicting and anticipating things happening, I'm not really getting much out of the story. The edge of the seat feeling has been taken away so it feels like it's not really worth spending the time.

Oddly enough this somehow still works fine for things I have already seen and thoroughly enjoyed - for example I could go binge Breaking Bad twice in a row at any time, no bother.

I guess in that case I'm looking forward to the great plot points and storylines I know are coming, but if something of unknown quality has been spoiled then I don't know the journey is good enough to plow through, so there's no anticipation and no dopa to be mined.

In summary spoilers take away the dopamine so there's no longer any drive or desire to begin consuming it in the first place.

I'm also confused by this. I actually dislike the antsy "what happens next" feeling, because it's a better-than-even shot that the upcoming twist I can feel coming up is just disappointing and not worth the buildup. I'd much rather just know what's going to happen and appreciate the artistry in invoking the buildup, then how the twist is touched on by every other part of the narrative.

I also try not to spoil anything for people, but I will almost always spoil myself as soon as I get any real interest in what's happening, so I'm not distracted away from appreciating the craft of it. [It also means if, e.g. the character that intrigues me the most dies off early, I can just not participate in it.]

For example: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is a horror novel, which is alright, but the angle of horror it's taking is $familiar_theme + $native_framework. Knowing this makes me more happy to read the book, not less. Otherwise I see some really dumb opinions, like panning The Only Good Indians for having native american-centric conflict in it... when it is very clear in every jacket, blurb, author bio, etc. about the book screams "this is about native american stuff".

That sounds super weird to me. Even a minor spoiler for me ruins everything. My goal is to be immersed in any kind of entertainment I spend time with, and spoilers are my absolute worst enemy.

This has been my approach to most media. I don't watch movie trailers. I just trust recommendations and go in blind.

With books I'll only get the roughest idea of what they're about and start reading. This has worked really well for fiction, but not so well with non-fiction. There is a lot of really tedious non-fiction out there.

I'm currently enjoying The Overstory. In the non-fiction category I'll recommend anything by Bill Bryson.

That might indicate if you like the prose, but that only really works if the author makes 100% sure to indicate what's the genre and theme of the novel already on the first paragraph?

You risk jumping into the middle of an embedded narrative that is markedly different from the rest of the book.

Ask a librarian!

They always have amazing suggestions based on what you like. They're like machines!

Source: my best friend is a librarian. So it might just be him.

I only read random passages. I only pick books from a few favourite publishers, they do the filtering for me.

For those who don’t remember it, the final four words are “He loved Big Brother.” Had to look that up as well.

I went through a phase in high school where I'd read the last sentence of a book first, and then begin it. It was actually pretty fun because it usually doesn't spoil very much. I stopped because once I did end up spoiling something major. Don't remember what though.

So we know it will have achieved general intelligence when it can convincingly reproduce >90% of HN comments.

Ah. I was wondering why I can never find anything I want to watch on Netflix.

I think reviews can be really useful when they're at the extreme of either end of the scale. Books with a positive blurb from an author I like can sway me, even though I'm sure they're paid for that and don't always read what they recommend.

I use reviews all the time for movies. I also don't put much faith in individual critics, but when the overall consensus of critics and internet randos suggests that a movie is terrible, it's probably terrible.

Negative movie reviews are more helpful than positive ones. A bad film might get overwhelmingly good reviews because it's got some political value or is considered "important".

Reviews for kid's movies are generally pretty honest when they're terrible, but some reviewers will inflate the scores based on how much they think it will appeal to kids so the middle ground in that genre is risky.

Good horror and sci-fi movies routinely get bad reviews from people who are just put off by the genre, so when horror or sci-fi films get wide acclaim they're probably worth checking out (although again, politics can throw this off).

Agreed. I never found any value in reading reviews before watching a movie. I may read them after if I want to see what others think, but it is rare.

I use reviews because life is too short. There will be more books I don't read than books I do. However, I've found that a mere recommendation from a geek is enough to find good science fiction. I don't have to read long or professional reviews. For films I have to use reviews, though. What the general public recommend tends to be completely crap for some reason.

Agreed. That goes for a lot of things. Around here there's a huge film festival once a year, thousands of visitors plus the town's population will fill the streets and watch movies all day and late night. What I've found is that it's pointless to read the daily updates by critics in the newspapers. It's like they're nearly always completely disconnected from what's actually good, for most people. As I'll have to shotgun-shop tickets during the festival week it's a good idea to have some indication of what I'll choose - as these are almost always totally unknown movies (and in general no Hollywood movies).

What works, for me and many others, is to simply listen to what people are telling each other while hanging around in a cafe or walking in the streets. Then pick movies from that. If they recommend a movie, get a ticket. I've watched astounding movies that way. In contrast, the critics.. meh. Most of the time.

One more thing about critics.. occasionally there's a little introduction by someone before the movie starts. If that person happens to be a critic then there's only one thing to do: Plug your ears and sing "nananana" to yourself until he or she is done. EVERY critic seems to have this extreme urge to reveal crucial parts of the plot. Only the critics do this, other people don't.

This is a little bit more true in the world of online reviews by random strangers. But if you find a reviewer that you “know well” they can be a godsend. You know their quirks, you know what you liked and they didn’t, etc. then a new review is full of this extra information. Their review isn’t a yes/no recommendation, it is parallax you can use to better understand if you will like it or not.

The trick is finding the reviewer who has the same taste as you.

I used to have one in the local paper, he could rate movies as a representative of their genre, instead of comparing the latest Marvel AAA CGI fest to Fellini and being disappointed because the Marvel one wasn't as deep.

Now I've got a few reviewers on Youtube I "trust" and have seen some less known movies based on their positive non-spoiler reviews.

I rather read at the start.

For $20 and 2 hours of my time, I think I at least want to know if the movie is going to be good. Trading off some element of surprise for less risk of feeling like I wasted my time and money.

Related: a couple studies have shown that spoilers actually increase people’s enjoyment of the book or movie, even for mysteries or stories with twist endings. If a story’s enjoyment relies entirely on one secret that isn’t supported by the build up to the reveal, that’s a flimsy story.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/spoiler-alert-sp...

The best sci-fi and fantasy ones for me have focused on describing the setting and then a very broad summary of the first few chapters. Typically little-to-nothing about the overall plot (just what would happen in those chapters), let alone the middle or ending.

Same. It's also quite a different experience reading a book without having any idea what it is about. Mostly Sci-Fi and Fantasy in my case.

These days I ask my partner to check for other books in a series. Even just trying to look up the sequels online can spoil quite a lot. This may sound like a hassle but it's actually not.

My personal worst experience of this was Philip K. Dick's Time out of Joint; since then I only read the blurbs after I'm finished.

I’ve also seen this with the two sentence blurb about TV series episodes on streaming and broadcasting services.

Eg, I was really pissed off seeing Sky TV spoil Game of Thrones like this. I browsing TV schedule one night to see was on, and accidentally saw a GoT episode summary scroll by : “After the death of XXXXX, the characters try to…”

It's so incredibly hard to find some older texts without some modernist forward lecturing us about a previous age. Just give me the text I'll make up my own mind.

Cover art is not unconnected to the work itself. It correlates fairly strongly with the stylistic choices made in a book, though that correlation becomes more tenuous the more distance you add between the author and the selection of cover art, be it middlemen in the form of a publisher and a separate cover artist or just the passage of time motivating new cover art matching the predominant contemporary aesthetic while the contents of the book remain unchanged. This correlation is the result of at least two factors: 1) that people who have specialized into a very specific niche have shared stylistic preferences that motivated them to specialize into the niche in the first place, resulting in a clustering of aesthetic preferences between niches, and 2) that even when middlemen are involved, those middlemen will try to align the aesthetics of cover art such that they align with the spirit of the book.

fiction can explore ideas in a way that non-fiction cannot.

What if humans achieved a post-scarcity society? Lets explore that idea ... turns into Star Trek. If you relegate yourself to purely non-fiction you can never explore that idea in a meaningful way.

I also would argue that if something is right in the blurb on the cover, it is not a spoiler in any meaningful sense. People have gotten so obsessed with avoiding spoilers these days, to a truly crazy extent. It's one thing to want to be surprised, but people get so neurotic about not wanting to know anything whatsoever.

That highly depends on the story. There are some stories which rely on surprising the reader in a delightful way. If that's revealed in the description it'll take away something really important. I've seen that many times. It makes reading the part up to then look very different, and more boring. In fact I don't like to read anything where it's clear where it's going, it doesn't have to be because it's revealed in the blurb, it can as well be because of the author's writing.

In contrast, for non-fiction a good summary is perfectly fine.