There is no need to justify why the book has been decaying on your shelf since college. You just need to keep it from being ruined until you maybe get to it someday. Reading this book is your white whale, and avoiding spoilers is the rope wrapped around your neck and harpooned into that white whale, just like at the end of Moby Dick.
Make Your Intentions Clear: Send friends, family, and especially employees at your local coffee shop an email telling them to provide no spoilers on this book. Send these messages multiple times a day so they don't forget. Make it the standard reply when they respond with “unsubscribe.” These constant digital reminders are much more manageable than carving a message like an “A” into your chest, as the Reverend did at the end of The Scarlet Letter.
Prepare for Potential Slips: There might be people you forgot or who have the audacity to mark your messages as spam, which is why you are buying an air horn. As soon as people remotely mention anything related to books or stories or give a look like they might provide a spoiler, just give it a blast. Knowing the noise will drown out spoilers, it will sound as sweet to you as the trumpets of Heaven sounded to Faust at the end of that book.
Use Technology: Besides helping delete texts containing “stop spamming me,” AI can filter for spoilers. You won't understand that it blocked your kids from watching Thomas the Tank Engine to save you from learning that Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train at the end of the book. That's not even the book you are trying to avoid spoilers from, but sacrifices must be made.
Avoid Reading: You already know witty jokes and literary reviews may contain spoilers, but postmodern sensibility inserts them anywhere. Avoid reading the mail, legal disclosures, messages in a bottle, and any other form of written communication. Just put them aside to read after you finish the book. As the piles of unread material begin to resemble stalagmites in a damp cave, you may hear hoarding complaints. Ignore them. You know the towers will eventually be read and then sink away like the mansion at the end of The Fall of the House of Usher.
Isolate Yourself: After the so-called “friends” and “family” complain of “fire hazards” and “noise ordinance violations,” isolating yourself becomes surprisingly easy. In a fort you built from unread books, mail, and magazines, you'll feel like Robinson Crusoe. You know, before he discovers the cannibals on the island, escapes on a mutinied English ship, and has a side quest in the Pyrenees that no one talks about. It's only by avoiding other people, phones, mail, books, and anything else that communicates that you can ensure there are no spoilers.
Seek Professional Help: After your barista stages an intervention with your friends and family, you agree to seek professional help. While they may have meant a therapist, you know everything will be more manageable if you know what to avoid as a spoiler. You confront an adjunct English professor in the Whole Foods parking lot before she goes to her night job stocking shelves. Once she realizes you are harmless and only want to discuss literature, she'll explain that you don't need to worry about spoilers for James Joyce's Ulysses. It has no plot twists and is incomprehensible to anyone without a Ph.D. in literature. As she drones on about the value of literature is your journey with the story, you realize that you only need to continue avoiding spoilers until the book becomes a movie.