I used to feel the same way. I prided myself on my intelligence and my ability to figure stuff out quickly. I remember being pissed off reading Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card because the main character was really smart and figured out solutions I would never find. I was jealous of detective characters like Sherlock Holmes and Thrawn from Star Wars because they always found the answer so easily. I now enjoy reading and I love these characters, but not the way I first read them.

Remember you are not competing with the characters. The author has specifically drafted these puzzles and reveals in advance. If you look critically, “smart” characters often make wild assumptions masquerading as intelligence, but because the author wants to tell a certain story, the “smart” characters are correct more often than they have any right to be. (There’s a reason Sherlock Holmes isn’t a police officer, his methods are basically the antithesis of forensics.) Yes, it’s theoretically possible to predict most twists, but the author rarely gives you enough information to do so. Even if you know what the clues are, authors rarely give the reader enough information to confidently predict the twist. This is how they guarantee everyone gets tricked and everyone thinks the “smart” character is intelligent.

If you want an to have an experience putting together clues and predicting the outcome, go do a puzzle. Story endings aren’t supposed to be predictable. Imagine if they were. If everyone could predict every ending and every plot twist, the story would get boring as hell. You know how it ends, so why read it? Good authors cut a very fine balance between making the outcome uncertain and giving you clues throughout the story. If the twist seemed logical in retrospect but you didn’t predict it, congratulations, you’ve read a talented author.

The real issue is your mentality. The author is not trying to hurt you when they deceive you with a plot twist, they are trying to invoke a sense of wonder. They are trying to make you question your beliefs and your assumptions about the world. If you’re not ready to question your intelligence, don’t read fiction.

That was my problem. I thought I was the smartest person ever. I thought I could figure out anything. Then I read stories with characters who figured things out before me, found solutions I never thought of, characters who were, frankly, smarter than me. And I found that offensive. That challenged my world view.

I’ve grown up since then. I’m not the smartest, but I don’t have to be. I can live a perfectly meaningful life just as I am. If you want to read, which I strongly encourage you to do, but you want to have all the facts on the table, no deception, read history. It’s their job to tell you all the facts and make sure you go home knowing everything. Until you can handle being surprised, until you can trust a good author to deceive you without hurting you, you’re not going to enjoy fiction.

Best of luck