When it comes to novels, says TIME book critic and Lavin speaker Lev Grossman, endings are so overrated:
I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they’re actually not as important as they’re sometimes given credit for. According to conventional wisdom, the ending of a book is supposed to sum up the book’s meaning in one sublime moment of dramatic closure. But I often find that after a month or two I can’t remember the ends of novels at all, even novels I loved — even detective novels, where the whole (putative) point of the book is the big reveal at the end. Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.