I was taking a look through my stats recently and saw a keyword phrase that caught my attention. After almost six years and Google’s move to ‘not provided’ mean I don’t tend to see new data from search visitors so this was rather novel.

I’ve used the phrase as the title of this post because it’s spot on. I really felt for this person as I expect many of you will also. Spoilers are something that, as a reader, you’re going to struggle with at some point, whether you like them or not; more often nowadays with the Internet, information more available.

I’ve dealt with the problem a number of times, most recently a couple of years ago when I was reading an unrelated article that, without warning, spoiled the ending of Anna Karenina. Many of the comments on the article thanked the author, sarcastically, for it.

This is where I get to answering my visitor’s question. There are a couple of ways to deal with spoilers you’d prefer you didn’t know. In my Tolstoy case, I knew that the spoiler was so strong I’d likely never forget it; the best way to deal with the situation was to move the book from its then current position, far down my list – I didn’t even have a copy of it – to the top. I was never going to forget the spoiler, I might as well just read the book now. By reading it now I would be making the best of the situation and could possibly turn it into a positive – I likely otherwise would still not have read it to this day. The timely release of the newest film adaptation cemented my decision.

In this case we can say that to a point I embraced the spoiler; this reading was undertaken in a different way to my usual. I was reading the book to see why and how things transpired as they did rather than to enjoy the plot. I did enjoy the plot but from the point of view of pacing and style rather than any thrill or anticipation. Ironically I ended up reading the book in a way more akin to re-reading; whilst I’m still not happy to have had it spoiled I appreciate that my accidental knowledge may have aided the output of Further Thoughts posts I finished my reading with. Knowing the climax meant I could write in context before my time.

If you don’t want to read the book now, if you want to rebel against this unwanted spoiling, there’s really only one other option – don’t read it. Wait until later, see if you can wait long enough, without reminding yourself of the details, that you forget them. Perhaps it helps that I had no immediate nor long-term plans anyway but a crucial element of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was spoiled for me some years ago by someone who used the phrase ‘everybody knows that…’ without thinking that that statement is so rarely true – and I have successfully forgotten it. I have a vague notion of what it pertained to but not the specifics, nothing to lead me to remember unless some other person uses the same statement. (I’m very much against the thinking behind the use of ‘everybody knows that…’ because it’s asking for upset and embarrassment.)

Whilst waiting it may help to read around the book in such a way that the detail you learned becomes blurred. Muddy the waters. It’s easier said than done but sometimes reading something like it but not the same can cause you to become confused – the aim here is to achieve the result of the history lover who goes on to read so many fictional re-tellings that they forget the facts. (Of course the history lover would have to be more fair-weather for this to really happen, hence the difficulty.)

Use the spoiler as a bittersweet nudge towards reading the book or do your best to hamper your memory. That’s really all you can do.

What do you do when you learn of spoilers for books you’re wanting to read?

At the moment I’m on a Victorian literature learning bender and as tends to be the case when you’ve already learned a fair amount on a subject I’ve been looking into the smaller details, going further afield to writers of other countries, looking at lesser-known writers who wrote for different ages.

And there they were – a list of Victorian children’s (chapter books) writers. And hold up a moment, go back. I recognised all of them.

To sum it up, all the children’s writers listed were ones I’d read in my childhood. It was a sudden realisation and please feel free to laugh because I’ve been reading and studying literature for, what is it, six years now, but have only just worked it out – my parents tricked me into reading classic books.

I use the word ‘tricked’ loosely because in fact I really love the idea. I can see in it my classics-loving father and my you-can-never-have-too-many-books-oh-dear-what-have-I-done mother, introducing me to the canon without any fanfare.

What’s interesting is the next thought I had. These books constituted gifts from my parents and extended family, books I’d not specifically asked for. And these I read at home; my choices at school were modern. It’s been a revelation – during a certain period of my childhood I finished very few books. I’ve often felt embarrassed by this. Now I can correlate the period with those books; it was the classical literature I didn’t finish.

Not all – I do remember finishing Little Women and I think I finished Pollyanna… or at least I finished the film. But Black Beauty, Heidi, What Katy Did? No. I remember finding them all very charming, though I wouldn’t have used that word then, but looking back with the hindsight and knowledge I have now I can see that the differences in culture and so on made these books less appealing. They were lovely and somewhat utopian but they didn’t represent my experience of life.

This is starting to sound as though it’s in line with my feelings as to the appropriateness of classics at exam level so I’ll say now that it’s not. Whilst I think classics at school are classics before their time, children’s books are obviously read at the right age, it’s just that time has moved on since their release date. Whereas a GCSE student will go on to have the experiences and knowledge to appreciate the Victorian adult canon, a children’s book naturally comes without the requirement to live first. It’s simply a sad fact that due to the progression of time a person may enjoy Victorian children’s literature more as an adult.

To spin off this subject I distinctly remember my editions of Black Beauty and Heidi included the word ‘unabridged’. Even then I was very happy to hear from my mother that this meant it was the complete text – I’ve always been someone who prefers a slow trudge if it means reading a book as it was written. What intrigues me about this is that abridged books are often children’s books. Adult books are abridged for children and recently there’s even been the publication of classics as board books for toddlers, told in twelve words (it’s quite fascinating, see here if you’re interested). But these are adult books made accessible for children – what exactly is the point of abridging a book that was written for children in the first place?

Of course there’s a reason; I suppose it’s to counteract that problem I had – the inability to relate. Children’s books don’t tend to be violent and whilst culture has changed as the years have gone by, Victorian children’s books were hardly gruesome. It’s an interesting one.

As for myself I think I’m going to try and incorporate those old books into my present reading.

Did you read Victorian chapter books during your childhood, Lewis Carroll aside? What do you think of the abridgement of children’s books?

“Have you seen any numbers of ‘The Pickwick Papers’?” said he. (They were then publishing in parts.) “Capital thing!”

I paused at the above. The kowtowing, or, at the very least, nod, to Dickens is obvious – Cranford was published first as a serial in Household Words, a magazine Dickens edited – but what struck me first and foremost was the use of current culture.

Discussed often and especially right now in these times of rapidly changing technology is whether or not including references to specific tech, items and so on, will date a book enough to make it irrelevant in a few short years. Chick-lit, for example, often refers to current culture and whole books are written in emails and tweets. (In this case we can at least say email’s been around for years, has simple taken over the letter. Twitter on the other hand is a new concept entirely and already appears to have peaked.)

Broad references and references to things that have or had been around for ages do of course date a book but more in the sense that they inform you of the era, help you set the time and location in your mind. A reference to Kanye West’s spoiling of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech will likely mean nothing within a dozen or so years. One reference or two might be okay but a book that’s packed with today’s news will likely be put aside tomorrow.

This whole mode of thinking is different when it comes to classics. Why is that? We could suggest that Gaskell had a crystal ball and ‘knew’ Dickens’ work would last but apart from a general sense that he wrote good books, Gaskell could only guess in the same way that we can only guess Michael Jackson’s music, Suzanne Collins’ books, will survive our era. In Gaskell’s case the usage is to do with her acquaintance with Dickens, an inside joke, and Dickens understandably left it in there. But why do we take no note of it, is it that we just enjoy the literary pleasure of this reference of one now famous person to another?

In Gaskell’s case here it doesn’t matter because The Pickwick Papers is famous – if we consider that Gaskell is more likely to be read after Dickens, after those who are more famous, then this reference is one of those long-lasting references that aren’t really dated because they’re still a part of our culture today. But how many references do we miss because they aren’t part of our culture? A lot, surely, because some we may not even think to look up – think of all the times you’ve missed the context of song lyrics until later because you didn’t know there was context to know about. Part of the exercise in reading classic literature is researching things that would’ve been known at the time of writing that have since been forgotten. Our discussions about dating books are moot when the classics are brought in.

Do you think dating an exclusively 21st Century idea? Do you think there’s an undefined cut off between the time dating wasn’t an issue and the time it was? Does worrying about missed contexts affect your reading?

I suppose this is obvious given what I’ve said about my preference for starting classics with ignorance, but I only ever read an Introduction of a book I’ve already read. This of course refers only to introductions written as a literary commentary (rather than your regular author-penned story introduction), those that are largely limited to classics, that discuss the plot.

In the general scheme of things I don’t understand their placement. Unless perhaps you are a teenager about to study a text inappropriate for your age that the curriculum doesn’t acknowledge needs more life experience to appreciate, where is the use of such an introduction?

Introductions spoil plots. They tell you all about the themes, the main events. The contextual information in regards to the comparison between book and author can be interesting, but as you can’t separate it from the spoilers it’s somewhat wasted placed where it is.

This is not to say I think they shouldn’t be written, but I do think that in most cases, introductions would work as afterwords. Of course you can choose not to read an introduction, but its placement suggests you read it first. If introductions were conclusions you’d have your own knowledge of the book to help you appreciate what had been written, there would be nothing to spoil, and you could enjoy it in hindsight. Instead of reading the commentary with limited comprehension, you’d be on a level playing field with its writer, and able to decide whether you liked or agreed with the comments. (For the reality being the reverse of this last point, one could almost say that the introduction is an attempt to teach what is the ‘correct’ reading or take-away from the book.)

What is your view of introductions – are they misplaced?

I’m in a reading slump at the moment, mostly because I’m overwhelmed by choice (high expectations rather than numbers in this case). It seemed the perfect time to ask why we don’t just get on with reading. It’s a deceptively simple question, I think, because it’s very first-world-problem whilst also pointing to something important – wasting time. We waste time choosing in general, not just reading time but spending time looking at our books – the problem is we look at them over and over again.

Why do we do this? We do it because we want a good book. We want this every time and so we try to work out which books wouldn’t be so good – a hard thing to do when we haven’t read them because the blurb can only say so much. Thinking on this begs the question: what are we doing trying to choose the right book in this context? If we need to choose then surely that means we’ve some bad books in the bunch and we’re due a culling session rather than a ponder. I do think that’s likely sometimes but it’s a bit utopian because if we culled for that reason alone we’d still be stuck; this time it would be choosing between extremely high-rated books that would quite possibly be similar in subject.

The thing is we’re planning, or at least hoping, to read all the choices at some point, what does choosing matter?

But we like to match books to moods. Of course we can ask how we know if it’ll fit but a better question is if it’s a book we think we’d like anyway is perfect timing really that important? All those times we say we read a book at the right time, might we have disliked it otherwise? In the case of mood probably not, unless it was in some way triggering at a certain moment, so why think so much? The case for reading a book at the ‘right’ time is surely that we might find more meaning in it, more value, and that is important, but we can get too invested in this idea when it’s a rare occurrence compared to the general good reading experience. It’d be pretty difficult to find the ‘right’ book every time.

I dislike wasting time choosing but thinking about that in itself holds me back. It makes it easier to fall into a slump as opposed to being strict with myself and just picking something. This is where more variety works in my favour, even a variety that includes very average, even bad, reads.

I’d like to think this procrastination, which is a good word for it because there’s an element of worry involved, can be worked out, but would it result in less joy? I’m not sure we should worry about every day items bringing us joy as Marie Kondo suggests because throwing out dirty laundry and ugly heirlooms would be a setback, but we should be concerned that our reading brings us joy. Reading becomes a chore when you’ve a list you want to deviate from but can’t.

Do you spend time deciding what to read?