No, you are right to complain about it. It’s a perfectly valid point. Not everybody can read every “classic” book in high school! People shouldn’t go around saying the end of Jane Eyre! (I say this with indignant exclamation points like I don’t ever tell anyone the end of anything. :p)

I sometimes like to know how; it depends on the book. With very suspenseful books (or films even more so), I like to know the general skeleton of the plot. Otherwise I am content to know the what at the end and let the how unfold.

I do agree that the why matters more than the what – and I love your having an image coloured in metaphor!

I can understand that impulse too. When I find myself getting a bit bored with a book, I very frequently skip around and read different sections, to see what I think, and if the end is unsatisfactory, I’ll give it up altogether. It can be a good way to motivate myself to read the rest of a book though! Like when I was reading Revolutionary Road, I was crazy bored and impatient with it at the beginning. Then I read the end and it lent urgency to the whole rest of the book, and I ended up really, really liking it. True story.

It is absolutely the whys that matter. Plus, if I’m going to be disappointed in the ending, I like to know as soon as possible and have plenty of time to prepare myself. 😉

I don’t do that, although my mother sometimes does! I usually start at the beginning, read long enough to get a feel for the premise and the characters, and then skip forward and read the last ten to twenty pages. But it depends on the book.

With books like this, you really have to read them in big chunks. (I’ve learned that the hard way when I had to restart stories more than once).