I don't mind if the text describes something I will read anyway in the first charpter or two... Like "Hercule Holmes and his sidekick Barnaby Watson go to africa for a vacation and find a dead body on the bus! Which of the passangers could be the murderer?" and then, after that, the mystery begins.
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? Now i'll expect it, and know that the 'obvious' murdeder isn't the one guilty of murder, but some twist will change everything.
Same for the movies... where the trailer has enough spoilers to see how the movie ends and who the murderer is.... it sucks... and it's not even a columbo-like movie, where you see the murder in the first scene, both you and Columbo know who the murderer is 2 minutes in, and you just wait to see how he "gets him"...
Some people get _so_ into a movie that they literally memorise every trailer. Then they actively try to find the scenes from the trailer while watching the movie.
And if those don't match, they'll shout at the Internet.
Case in point: Rogue One had shots in the trailer that never made it to the final movie (charging through the beaches and the Tie-fighter rising to meet Jyn in the tower). People went berserk.
But I 100% agree with you, they should shoot the trailer scenes separately and not have any of them actually in the movie just to keep it interesting.
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.
>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.
The inside front cover blurb for Bored of the Rings is quite entertaining and bears no resemblance to the contents in the slightest. By not reading the jacket, you'd miss this little gem.
“Do you like what you doth see . . . ?” said the voluptuous elf-maiden as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded, shadowy glories within. Frito’s throat was dry, though his head reeled with desire and ale. She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated boggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of her. “Let me make thee more comfortable,” she whispered hoarsely, fiddling with the clasps of his jerkin, loosening his sword belt with a laugh. “Touch me, oh touch me,” she crooned. Frito’s hand, as though of its own will, reached out and traced the delicate swelling of her elf-breast, while the other slowly crept around her tiny, flawless waist, crushing her to his barrel chest. “Toes, I love hairy toes,” she moaned, forcing him down on the silvered carpet. Her tiny, pink toes caressed the luxuriant fur of his instep while Frito’s nose sought out the warmth of her precious elf-navel. “But I’m so small and hairy, and . . . and you’re so beautiful,” Frito whimpered, slipping clumsily out of his crossed garters. The elf-maiden said nothing, but only sighed deep in her throat and held him more firmly to her faunlike body. “There is one thing you must do for me first,” she whispered into one tufted ear. “Anything,” sobbed Frito, growing frantic with his need. “Anything!” She closed her eyes and then opened them to the ceiling. “The Ring,” she said. “I must have your Ring.” Frito’s whole body tensed. “Oh no,” he cried, “not that! Anything but . . . that.” “I must have it,” she said both tenderly and fiercely. “I must have the Ring!” Frito’s eyes blurred with tears and confusion. “I can’t,” he said. “I mustn’t!” But he knew resolve was no longer strong in him. Slowly, the elf-maiden’s hand inched toward the chain in his vest pocket, closer and closer it came to the Ring Frito had guarded so faithfully . .”
I remember reading Ender's Game and being blown away by it when I was younger. Years later I picked up a new edition of it in a bookstore and read the back cover. The spoiler is right there. IMO that ruins the entire book if you know. I still can't believe the publishing house did that.
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 don't "get" spoilers. Like I don't care at all. Sometimes I will read a book and think it's getting too slow so I will jump on youtube and see a summary or head to a fandom wiki article or whatever. And then I will happily read it again. Spoilers do not spoil anything for me and I don't get why it would spoil anything for others.
People recommend me stuff and tip-toe around not to spoil anything and I will tell them to tell me all of it, I want to know if I should invest time into this thing they are recommending. Every single time people tell me no, read it, and don't respect the idea that someone is different from them. Give me the contents or I won't read it at all.
I am used to others not wanting spoilers, and it seems I'm quite unique in this regard, so I generally try to never spoil stuff, but I still don't quite get it.
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.
This is sorta funny to me as when I read I can sometimes skip several chapters ahead or to the end of the book, even with movies and shows I can watch them in whatever order. What happens later in a story has no impact at all on whether I will like the road to it. Most of the time I find myself not even remembering the parts ahead when I re-read them either, or just vaguely remembering them.
I've had it explained to me many many times, the thing about surprises and plot twists and whatever but really it doesn't phase me at all.
I had a classmate who was a voracious reader. They happily read book series with overarching plots out of order and didn't bother them the slightest bit.
"The second book was on loan, so I grabbed the third instead and read that".
Haha, maybe. If you live in Sweden. But I'm guessing by your username that you are a few years older than me. However, I have read books in the wrong order!
Are there ever actual surprises though? I remember how amazing it was to see movies as a kid and find out about Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father, but after 40 more years of watching movies, surprises are very few and far between. I have a better understanding of the language of movies.
I agree with you though for whodunit movies where there’s a lot of misdirection and surprise is the point. But knowing a lot about Barton Fink or some James Bond movie doesn’t diminish my fun.
It is not just a matter of surprise, though - in the presence of foreknowledge, it is harder for the author to create, and the reader to feel, any sort of dramatic tension.
There is a decline in big mind blowing conceptual shifts in media, like we experienced in Star Wars after decades of Spaghetti Westerns. Social and conceptual shifts are happening in real time, out in the world now. The big media build up to change has been reduced signficantly.
Goldeneye could have been more thrilling if the trailers withheld the reveal of Alec Trevalyn as the bad guy.
1995 was a year where most people couldn't look up movie information on the internet... going into the movie theatre blind, it would have been awesome to get the secret revealed on the big screen.
I really enjoyed the shock of seeing future Thor smack into the invisible barrier - his determination, the crescendoing music, the hope that _finally_ someone is going to do something... Splat.
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".
>I actually dislike the antsy "what happens next" feeling
This part is especially true for content that is supposed to be.. cringe.. embarrassing.. sort of? Like imagine things like a comedy or drama that is supposed to evoke those feelings. I can't take it. It physically hurts. Sometimes I have to pause or stop watching. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was such a movie, I just couldn't finish it. I read about the story instead and figured out what was going to happen and then I could watch it, no problem.
Yes! Especially the cringe! When the twist is cringe inducing I also have to put that stuff down and leave for a while. I once blind-watched a movie, and some chick in the movie screamed upon seeing a surprise corpse that was clearly actually a pretty female actor with full hair and makeup pretending to be dead. It was so cringe inducing I had to leave the theater for a few minutes, in what was meant to be a thriller or scary movie or something. If I knew the corpse would be there I could at least go 'yep, here is the cringe bit, it'll get better later'.
That being said there is work I'm happy to go into blind because I trust the creator of the media. I will buy and read my favorite authors with no summary or anything, e.g. the Murderbot series. I simply trust they have their craft down that nothing hits wrong, and chances are good, they just pull it off and it all works.
I go in blind with some authors too but more often then not I just spoil it anyways, even if I know I can trust the author. Because the journey is still what matters. :)
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.
I do the same, but also with mystery content. I re-read stuff on and off as well. Also re-watch movies and shows too. If I like something, I like something.
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.
It's like I understand the meaning of what you are saying but not really comprehending the feeling of it. I honestly get the same edge of the seat feeling with new media as with old media, even if I know what is going to happen. I get the same dopamine from a good story whether I know about it or not, so for me it's always better to know because then I also know if it's worth watching or reading.
That's fair that! The world would be a boring place if we were all the exact same :)
I do know dopamine levels/production/uptake vary from person to person (ADHD being one of the more famous results of a lack-of, for example) - Sounds like you've landed in the sweet spot to enjoy media however it's presented! :)
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.
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 completely agree, and I'm glad someone wrote so eloquently about this.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks (often for book clubs), i.e. which don't require handling a physically printed cover, and I've really enjoyed the experience of figuring out "what is this book about, and who even are the main characters??", that would have been completely robbed by even a quick perusal of the book jacket.
Oh, you want to know what I'm reading now? Everything by Irvin Yalom. Lying on the Couch is a good place to start.
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.
> In the non-fiction category I'll recommend anything by Bill Bryson.
Please no. Bryson’s The Mother Tongue is one of the worst pop-sci books on linguistics ever published, with a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page. Because, after all, Bryson is a journalist and a humorist and not any actual expert in that field. As entertaining as some of his other books may be, I suspect that he plays fast and loose with facts there as well.
French novels quite often have just the first paragraph of the book on the (back) cover, I think that works rather well (and I have bought books by unknown authors on the strength of that).
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?
I do get the impression that French writers take particular care on the first paragraph (for just that reason I guess), while they will often "just end", like a sudden "fin" 90 minutes into a 60s New Wave film ...
I’ve generally found that reading a random page in the book is most indicative of whether I’ll like it. Especially with well-reviewed, famous authors that have awards and laudatory quotes all over the book cover.
For example, I picked up a book by Salman Rushdie, thinking “he’s an award-winning author and this plot summary seems interesting.” But after reading a few pages, I simply can’t get through the style…it’s not for me.
This is something that oddly enough isn’t covered in book review magazines like the NYRB or LRB, which don’t contain excerpts.
I usually read books recommended by other people, articles, goodreads, bookclub, etc.
However, when I'm browsing in the library I always go by jacket art and blurb, then read a few random passages. How else to sift through dozens of books to find the one I want to invest my time in?
2 things (in the corporate world): Android and Spring framework. It's also basically OOP the language which means large enterprises are biased towards it.
Other factors are that it has very strong built-in libraries and has become a popular choice for "how to program" classes so lots of people are familiar with it. Having a similar name to JavaScript (the web's native language) also helps.
These are reasons for why an individual hacker might not take to a language. They don't factor in to a large organisation's choice of language. And to be honest, quite a few of these arguments would apply to Javascript as well.
I have two questions for the author of this essay:
1) Does this apply equally to non-fiction (the essay seems to be about primarily about novels)
2) Does she finish most books or does she quickly abandon the ones that don’t click?
My biggest problem is that there are far too many books to read and I’ll take almost anything that helps me winnow the list. So yeah, knowing what it’s about helps.
Not sure I agree, particularly with the 'I don't want to hear about the story' part. I have a bit of a general chagrin with the 'no spoilers' obsession. Yeah, there may be works like Game of Thrones where the unpredictability is part of the appeal (I wouldn't know though, tbf, never watched or read it), but that's not universal. Usually when I go to the theater to watch a classic play, I try to make sure to read at least a short plot summary beforehand, ideally a longer analysis, to be sure I get everything that's going on and also have additional context. I'd wish for a more general appreciation of the fact that not every discussion of a story before you've consumed it needs to be a 'spoiler' - sometimes it can actually be an enhancer.
When I was in middle school I found my mom’s 1984 edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The back cover had some phrase like “engrossing from the first sentence to the last 4 words.”
If the cover had just said “engrossing from beginning to end” it wouldn’t have tempted me, but specifically saying “4 words” made it irresistible!
I think I made it through half of the book before I broke down and skipped to the end. It’s undoubtedly a spoiler, but certainly not an unexpected twist.
I still finished the book and was indeed engrossed by the concepts for a few years.
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.
> book descriptions have become so bland and tropey that they tell us nothing about a title’s style or contents. Words like “dazzling,” “brilliant,” and “amazing” have become so ubiquitous as to lose all meaning.
There's a reason why tools like GPT seem so good when writing marketing, advertising and business copy in general. The problem is that this type of content has been for a long time completely devoid of... content. Most of this kind of text is formulaic, pompous and yet utterly devoid of deep meaning. It is as low-entropy as you can get. So, no wonder that a stochastic machine can produce this kind of text in a so believable manner.
No matter what we think about ourselves, we're pretty much the same here and mostly comment the same stuff based on a few niches of beliefs and personal/professional experiences.
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).
> Books with a positive blurb from an author I like can sway me, even though I'm sure they're paid for that
FYI at least in fiction books, the author is rarely if ever paid to blurb a book. They're just offered an advanced copy or ebook and like it, they'll send a blurb back to the publisher.
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 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.
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.
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.
When I was a child, I voraciously reread all of my favorite books over and over, and I loved the book jackets because – well, they were an extra few words from my favorite books to enjoy!
I dont have a link handy but I remember seeing a study showing that movie/TV trailers that spoil the content (ie basically show you a 3min summary of the movie) were more successful in getting people to the theater. People seem to want to know before hand what they're about to watch.
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.
I don't think that conclusion tells the whole story. If you take a great movie with a very famous twist in in it, they are not good because of the secret/twist, but the secret/twist definitely has greater power if you don't know it beforehand.
For example, there are some movies like The Prestige, The Crying game and The Usual Suspects there is a set up and when the twist happens, you look back and realise the movie was hinting at it at various points but you didn't expect it. If you knew, you would see the hints much more easily and the look back would not be as fun. This sort of has the same impact as a magic trick. It's fun to be fooled.
Some other movies like Se7en, Chinatown and "Easy Rider" I would call "bolt from the blue" where the impact is mostly like being punched in the guts. It's not fun but again if you are not emotionally prepared by knowing what will happen it is much more powerful.
I wouldn't say any of those had a flimsy story. In in all cases the enjoyment comes from the writing, direction, performances etc all being of a very high standard, not just from the twist. The twist really adds something though.
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.
The article makes the point that I also agree with, most people buy books because someone loved it and told them about it with passion.
And then a small number of "book people" actively seek out books like it is an adventure, and then filter the winners out to friends, family, community, and net...
since a self-published author has to write the blurb himself (of course, you usually wouldn't even have a dust jacket, unless you went to the expense of a hardcover), I'm curious:
What would you want to see on the jacket?
The first paragraph? That puts an unfairly high burden on the first paragraph, IMHO. If a friend is telling you about the book, they're almost always going to say more than would fit in those few paragraphs.
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.
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…”
I've seen streaming services spoil an episode with just the thumbnail. I can't remember what show's twist was ruined for me, but I'm pretty sure it was Netflix.
Netflix also has a really annoying habit of re-ordering seasons. For some bizarre reason shows like bake off are listed with the most recently added series first. For some shows that might not be a huge problem but in the first episode of one series they actually recap the winners of all previous series, spoiling several years of programing for unwary netflix viewers.
At least one extremely typical problem on Netflix and basically every other streaming service is that the episode thumbnails (which I usually have to go take a look at just to find out how many episodes there are) will ruin any cliffhangers. If a character's survival seems uncertain, the uncertainty will be lessened quite a bit by seeing their face in the thumbnail of a subsequent episode.
A lot of translated titles contain slight spoilers though, for example "predestination" becomes "time paradox" in Korean, it immediately gives you a hint of some part of the twist.
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.
Agreed. I'd say the excerpts on the back of DVDs are actually worse than books. Have been burned by those a few times. Not that DVDs are that common anymore.
I briefly chatted with Chris Hitchens a few times, and during one of them, he extolled the virtues of never, ever reading a book jacket, or foreward before reading the source material.
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.
Some years ago, I gave a family member the NYRB printing of Butcher's Crossing by John Williams. The thank you note said that he had loved the book, but hated the introduction. I told him that I had been vaguely aware that book had an introduction, but hadn't read it and still might not. Generally, I don't read introductions, unless they are by the author.
Maybe it marks me semi-literate, but I've always liked the cover art. I know that it's absolutely unconnected to the work itself, but it shows an effort on the part of the publisher that lately has been sadly lacking, and they're pretty incentivized to hint at the nature of the story in a way that matters to me. They are seeking readers for that kind of fiction, after all.
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.
I have written and edited jacket copy. Part of the fun is that it is derived from catalog copy, and may not have been written with the manuscript in hand. the most fun is making a terrible book seem not so terrible. And when you’re doing it freelance, you have to do it fast, because the pay is a pittance.
Similarly I avoid watching trailers for films. Not only are they obnoxious pieces of marketing, they ruin how the film maker intended the work to be received. Often they seem to have no respect for the film maker at all. I love just letting the story unfold before me.
I pretty much never read the jacket copy until I’ve finished the book. It’s not so much about spoilers as it is about falling into a normative interpretation of the text.
If you keep a list on your phone of interesting-sounding authors and comb used book stores you’ll rarely run out of options.
The jacket copy for Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is far and away the best I’ve ever read — not surprising that he wrote it himself.
Tangential - I used to go to a film club where they would show you a movie and you would have no idea at all what it was going to be. That added a lot to the experience.
It is a very natural corollary of not judging a book by its cover. Judgment is almost impossible to avoid, so you should naturally not expose yourself to it.
After making a good cover, picking your eight key search words and writing a good catchy summary is probably the hardest part of the authoring process. I have had about ten goes now for my book but none have managed to generate more than a couple of clicks. It is a lot harder than it first seems and the search algorithms for new authors are not your friend.
I have discovered and enjoyed so many books by reading the book jackets, which I would not have, if I only followed recommendations. I feel like doing this actually lets me make my own judgements about a book instead of restricting myself to lists or recommendations of "good" books.
That being said, there’s no way I’m picking up a book and reading it without atleast knowing what the book is about. I bet no one would unless you are already familiar with an author.
Unfortunately my DNR pile is way too large as it is. If I didnt use a summary of the book to strike it out before reading it, my DNR pile would probably put some hoarders to shame.
This is a real toss-up! On one hand, you've got those quirky blurbs like in 'Bored of the Rings' that are just for laughs, totally off-script from the actual book. But then, there's the spoiler territory - like revealing a plot twist on the jacket, basically turning the reading experience into a predictable journey. And who can forget the 'Ender's Game' debacle? A major plot reveal on the back cover? Talk about a literary facepalm. So, it's a gamble – sometimes the jacket adds flavor, other times it's a total spoiler fest
It's interesting how this post seems to implicitly assume that all books are fiction, but my implicit assumption tends to be the opposite. I don't understand why people read fiction when you can read about things which actually happened. I try to enjoy fiction, but there's always a little voice in my head saying: "Is that actually realistic?" With reading history, that doesn't happen. And nonfiction provides useful knowledge too.
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.
it's obviously true, fiction can explore everything non-fiction can but the reverse is not true.
If that ever stops being true then the categories stop having meaning.
It's not an issue that you prefer non-fiction, the book you posted is philosophy and many people enjoy it. But I've explained the appeal of fiction to you, take it or leave it.
Meh. Many of the greatest works open by explaining themselves in miniature (to the extent that it's probably a named literary technique). If you let your engagement with a work be circumscribed by what you're told about it beforehand, that seems more like a you problem.
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.
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.
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? Now i'll expect it, and know that the 'obvious' murdeder isn't the one guilty of murder, but some twist will change everything.
Same for the movies... where the trailer has enough spoilers to see how the movie ends and who the murderer is.... it sucks... and it's not even a columbo-like movie, where you see the murder in the first scene, both you and Columbo know who the murderer is 2 minutes in, and you just wait to see how he "gets him"...