Not posting in AIBU as I know damn well I'm being unreasonable because I could just choose not to read them. But somehow I feel compelled to, even knowing how wrist-gnawingly banal, patronising and superficial they've been every time I've come across a book that has them, and how they'll potentially spoil whatever last impressions and thoughts the book left me with, by making me feel like I'm back at junior school answering comprehension questions.
When I say "patronising", just one example: a question at the end of a book I just finished instructed the reader to look up the definitions of a couple of words which were used in the book as names for particular tech widgets, and then think about why those words might have been chosen. Cause it definitely wouldn't have occurred to me to look them up myself before answering the question, if I didn't happen to know. (Which I did, because it was "flotsam" and "jetsam", which might not be the kind of thing you can just assume someone will have happened to come across, but it's not some arcane terminology beyond the ken of any common reader.)
And… well, every time I come across these crappy book club questions at the end of a book, even something I enjoyed or thought was interesting or clever or elegant, somehow my brain immediately tries to bump it across into an "okay so basically like Jodi Picoult then" category, because that's where I first came across them. Just having book club questions there does something strange to my perception of genre, quality etc. even when I've just read the bloody thing.
Does anyone else hate these questions/suggested discussion topics, but find themselves unable to stop reading when the book ends?