From Booking Through Thursday, suggested by Prairie Progressive:
I had to think about this. I\’m kind of all over the place. If it\’s fiction and brand-new to me, I\’ll often read the flaps and all blurbs on the back before starting, to get an idea of what I\’m in for. If it\’s an author I\’m returning to, I usually skip it because I want to approach the book with an empty slate. Sometimes I go back and read it after I\’m done, to see how the flap description matched up with what I thought of the book. Sometimes it seems way off the mark, as if whoever wrote the flap copy didn\’t even read the entire book!
With nonfiction, I often come up with a question somewhere in the middle of my reading that I think flap copy might answer (usually about the author) and read it then. I have a very old worn copy of Icebound Summer, with an awful-looking dust jacket that I\’ve kept just because the flap copy is informative about the origins of the book itself, and I didn\’t want to loose that information.
And then there\’s always books of all descriptions where it never even occurs to me to read the flaps, and I just dive right in. I guess it depends on how much I want to know beforehand, and how informative the flaps might be.
What about you? do you read the flaps?