It's generally asssumed that book-readers don't like spoilers - too much information about the plot and what happens at the end. The big pleasure of reading is supposedly the "wait and see" element.
But an experiment by Californian psychologists suggests that actually this isn't true. They found that people who read stories containing spoilers actually enjoyed them more than the untouched version.
This took them by surprise, so much so that they're struggling to come up with any convincing explanation of why this might be. They wonder for instance if people reach a deeper understanding of a story when they aren't preoccupied with the plot and its complexities.
Journalist Alison Flood says that when reading a horror story she likes to check that the hero/heroine is still alive at the end. With romantic stories, she likes to find out straightaway who gets off with whom. She insists this unorthodox peeking doesn't affect her enjoyment at all.
Personally I don't like to be told the entire plot of a novel before I start reading it, though in some cases the plot is so fiendish that a summary I could refer to when totally confused would be handy (Nicole Krauss's The History of Love comes to mind).
And I do admit to thumbing through the pages to find out if my favourite character ends up alive or dead, or if the odious wife-beater eventually gets his come-uppance. Sometimes my curiosity is so great I just can't wait for another 200 pages to satisfy it.
But if the "wait and see" element is so crucial, how come we like rereading books, when we already know exactly what happens? Shouldn't we be throwing them in the dustbin?
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