I have a confession to make: I skip ahead and read the endings of books. I can hear the gasps now, as I have officially broken one of the reading “rules”. But give me a chance to explain, and I might even persuade you to break the rules next time and sneak a peak at those last few pages!
One of my favorite genres is cozy mysteries; stories that do not involve the guts and gore of a gruesome murder, but rather an amateur sleuth trying to figure out “who done it” while running a business in a small town. With these stories there is the great suspense of figuring out who the murderer is, because it is usually someone right under the reader’s nose! I can’t handle the suspense! I have to know! So I usually read the first 15-20 pages of the book, and by this point the main characters have been introduced and the body has been found...and I jump ahead to read the last 15-20 pages. I find reading the ending first very freeing, because it allows me to focus on all the characters and various plot points, rather than obsessing over solving the case. I still experience the “ah-ha” of finding out who the murder suspect is, just earlier than most readers.
Another genre I enjoy is romance. Not sickening-sweet love stories, but realistic stories about characters I can relate to and have real-life struggles similar to mine. Since “happily ever after” is usually reserved for fairy tales, I have to find out if the characters are going to end up together before I get invested in them. For most readers the unknown is what inspires them to keep turning pages, but for me the unknown just causes stress. As I read I can imagine the characters in my mind, and feel a growing connection to them. Reading the ending does not deter me from going back to read the book in its entirety, I just like to have my expectations set from the beginning.
This habit of reading the end of a book has grown. I used to not “cheat” until about halfway through a book, and only on certain types of books. Slowly the habit has spread to earlier in the reading of all books. I don’t know if this habit can be broken, and honestly I don’t know that I even want to break the habit. It is part of my reading inclination. So as I pick up the next book in my stack of summer reading I’m starting at the end, I just can’t help myself.
