This week’s Booking Through Thursday question, suggested by A Prairie Progressive, is:
Do you read the inside flaps that describe a book before or while reading it?
My answer: No. I don’t read the inside flaps before reading the book, and I don’t understand why I’d read them *while* reading the book. I don’t read most of the back cover, either — for the same reason. I don’t want to know too much about a story before I discover those things myself, from the text itself. Cover copy has a bad habit of revealing too much of the story, the plot, for my taste. Now, I do occasionally check jacket copy when I’m writing a review and I want to verify a pertinent fact. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t, but checking there is easier than re-reading whole chapters of the book, which is basically the only other option at that point.
