Want to upset a novelist? Tell them you always read the end of a book when you are halfway through reading. 
 
 Not only will you be marked down as a philistine, you will be condemned as someone whose disregard for the order in which they intended their book to be read makes you unfit to read it at all. That, at least, was the reaction to my unwitting confession to this habit recently. 
 
 Unlike Harry in When Harry Met Sally, I do not read the end “in case I die before I get there”. I do it because I am a literary flâneuse: not only does knowing the end mean I can enjoy the scenery, but it means I am insured against that dreadful crime – the Bad Ending. I don’t mean heartbreaking goodbyes to characters I love, I mean the dreadful realisation that everyone, including the writer, has basically gone home in the last 50 pages. Bad endings don’t just betray the characters, they betray the reader. 
 
 I have lost count of the times friends have moaned about being let down by the end to a book they loved, while I listened smug in the knowledge I insured against that by skipping. Take Michel Faber’s otherwise brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. As friends complained that the last 50 pages lost momentum, my bad habit meant none of the savour of the exhilarating journey was tarnished. While friends ploughed on with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to “see what the fuss was about”, I moved on to something more enjoyable, safe in the knowledge I wasn’t missing out, because I had already read the last chapter. 
 
 This is not the way authors see it. Rowan Coleman begged me not to read the end of her forthcoming novel The Summer of Impossible Things because she had spent 14 months figuring it out. She said: “When you spend such a very long time carefully crafting pace and reveal, you do rather want the reader to trust you. I can tell if I trust a writer from chapter one. If I don’t, I don’t read on.” 
 
 Children’s author Chris Priestly was equally saddened. “The order a story is in is the writer’s intended order,” he pointed out. Like Coleman, he felt I lacked trust when I broke the journey to check out the destination. “I’m not shocked,” he hastened to add, “just a bit baffled as to why you would deliberately cheat yourself of the pleasure of that linear development of a story”. 
 
 To them, skipping implies a lack of trust in their vision, a failure to understand the engineering and skill that goes into unfurling a plot. But that isn’t true for me. I am sure Sebastian Barry slaved over the structure of his epic Days Without End so that it communicated his vision of diaspora, identity and nationhood. But knowing what happened in the last few pages did not undermine my pleasure in his telling, it enhanced it. 
 
 And I’m not the only one: proper science proves I’m on to something. Back in 2011, a study at the University of California found that instead of spoiling a book, skipping ahead enhances the pleasure. “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,” said Nicholas Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology. Even better, he found that once a reader knew how the story ended, they were able to enjoy a deeper experience of the prose. My point exactly. ||||| Spoiler Alert: 
 
 Stories Are Not Spoiled by 'Spoilers' 
 
 Inga Kiderra 
 
 Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of stories we have yet to read or see – plugging our ears, for example, and loudly repeating “la-la-la-la,” when discussion threatens to reveal the outcome. Of book and movie critics, we demand they not give away any plot twists or, at least, oblige with a clearly labeled “spoiler alert.” We get angry with friends who slip up and spill a fictional secret. 
 
 But we’re wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don’t spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment. 
 
 Even ironic-twist and mystery stories – which you’d be forgiven for assuming absolutely depend on suspense or surprise for success – aren’t spoiled by spoilers, according to a study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego’s psychology department, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. 
 
 Christenfeld and Leavitt ran three experiments with a total of 12 short stories. Three types of stories were studied: ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each story – classics by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver – was presented as-is (without a spoiler), with a prefatory spoiler paragraph or with that same paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it. Each version of each story was read by at least 30 subjects. Data from subjects who had read the stories previously were excluded. 
 
 Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Subjects read stories as-is and with introductory paragraphs that gave away the endings, or spoilers. In almost all cases, they preferred the "spoiled" stories. (Click image for larger view) 
 
 The same held true for mysteries. Knowing ahead of time that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is, in fact, the perpetrator not only didn’t hurt enjoyment of the story but actually improved it. 
 
 Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones. 
 
 Why? The answers go beyond the scope of the study, but one possibility is perhaps the simplest one: that plot is overrated. 
 
 “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,” said Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology. 
 
 “Monet’s paintings aren’t really about water lilies,” he said. 
 
 It’s also possible that it’s “easier” to read a spoiled story. Other psychological studies have shown that people have an aesthetic preference for objects that are perceptually easy to process. 
 
 “So it could be,” said Leavitt, a psychology doctoral student at UC San Diego, “that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.” 
 
 But the researchers are careful to note that they do not have a new recipe for writers to follow. After all, spoilers helped only when presented in advance, outside of the piece. When the researchers inserted a spoiler directly into a story, it didn’t go over quite as well. 
 
 The overall findings are consistent with the experience most of us have had: A favorite tale can be re-read multiple times with undiminished pleasure. A beloved movie can be watched again and again. 
 
 “Stories are a universal element of human culture, the backbone of the billion-dollar entertainment industry, and the medium through which religion and societal values are transmitted,” the researchers write. In other words, narratives are incredibly important. But their success doesn’t seem to hinge on simple suspense. 
 
 Christenfeld and Leavitt conclude the paper by saying that perhaps some of our “other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong.” 
 
 “Perhaps,” they write, “birthday presents are better when wrapped in cellophane, and engagement rings are better when not concealed in chocolate mousse.” 
 
 We might be also well-advised to reconsider surprise parties, Christenfeld said. Meanwhile, he and Leavitt continue to investigate what makes stories work – or not. Numerous recent scandals about fictionalized memoirs have inspired them to explore why it matters that a story be true. “Why does it matter,” Christenfeld said, “whether something happened to one person in five billion or to no one? If the story is still a good story, why do we care?” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Media Contacts: Inga Kiderra, 858-822-0661 or ikiderra@ucsd.edu 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

– The writer who covers the books beat at the Guardian has some advice for fellow readers that might sound like heresy: When you're halfway through a novel, skip ahead and read the ending. Danuta Kean does this routinely and makes the case that knowing how things turn out doesn't ruin anything—in fact, it makes the book more enjoyable. If the ending works, she goes back and finishes the whole thing. But if it's weak, she moves on to something new, and that's the bigger point. "Not only does knowing the end mean I can enjoy the scenery, but it means I am insured against that dreadful crime—the Bad Ending," she writes. They're way too common, she writes, and they "don’t just betray the characters, they betray the reader." Kean runs this by actual novelists, who generally sound a little horrified that any reader would do this. “When you spend such a very long time carefully crafting pace and reveal, you do rather want the reader to trust you," says Rowan Coleman, who adds some reading advice of her own. "I can tell if I trust a writer from chapter one. If I don’t, I don’t read on.” Kean is undeterred, however. She even cites a study out of the University of California San Diego that found spoilers don't hurt readers' enjoyment. Researchers discovered that "once a reader knew how the story ended, they were able to enjoy a deeper experience of the prose," writes Kean. "My point exactly." (Click for the full piece.)