Reading Group Discussion Questions - Helpful or Not?

The publishers of many current novels hope to be chosen by the thousands of reading groups across the United States and elsewhere. They promote the novels to groups with "Readers' Guides" (usually in the back of the book) that include interviews with, or special messages from, authors, as well as with discussion questions. If I pick up one of these novels, I enjoy reading the material from or about the author, but I often find the discussion questions simplistic, even inane. To be fair, the questions are occasionally helpful, thoughtful and provocative...but not usually, in my experience. I don't know if the questions are written by the authors or by someone in the publishers' offices. I can't decide if the publishers (and/or authors) are condescending to their readers, or if my opinion about the discussion questions is the minority one. As I wrote about on 1/26/10, I have been in a wonderful reading group myself for 35 years, and I don't remember our ever using such published discussion questions in our meetings. (In the spirit of full disclosure: my recent academic book also includes discussion questions, but the reason in that case is that the publisher and I hoped that the book would be assigned as a textbook in university classes. However, I acknowledge that it is quite possible that some readers might find those discussion questions -- written by me! -- simplistic or inane as well!)