I sometimes give away too much info about a book in my attempt to convey my enjoyment of the book and encourage another person to also give it a try. Spoiler, btw, refers to whatever info that spoils the surprise or suspense, but more generally, spoils the enjoyment of the book. So revealing details about a twist would be a spoiler, but perhaps so is suggesting that there will be a twist (I'm not sure).
A clear case would be saying that the mayor's killer turns out to be his dogwalker's son, whereas it would not be a spoiler to say the murder is someone you least suspect. But not every book is about a murder, and many do not involve such clear distinctions, so you might still ruin the enjoyment of a book by being too enthusiastic about it and saying a little too much.
So now I'm cautious. Too cautious.
Once I revealed what I thought was very basic plot elements of a book, but this counted as spoilers for that person because they had not read the previous book in the series. So I think context matters too.
And I see a lot of other cautious people here too, putting very basic info about a book in spoiler tags. Better safe than sorry.
by yanluo-wang
1 Comment
I loaned a book to a friend once and was raving about how good it was and how much they were going to enjoy it. Was back over at their place a few weeks later and they gave it back to me. I asked if they enjoyed it and they told me they didn’t bother because after my excited rambling they figured they already knew everything they needed to know about it. I felt so bad- I probably still think about that a few times a year and yell at myself.