I just got Brave New World and I am super excited to finally read it. Side note: I absolutely love the cover of this version!! I also like how they combined Brave New World and Revisited into a single edition.
The Forward is 15 pages and the Preface is 9 pages and I always feel like I need to read them before I can actually start the book. Something about skipping pages for any reason just seems wrong to me. But I am also a very slow reader, I really like to ponder each paragraph and look up words I don’t know, and 25 pages that’s probably full of all kinds of cultural references and name-drops will take me a little while. I want to skip them but I feel like the Gods of reading would frown upon it. So yeah. For this reason I dislike Forwards and Prefaces.
How do you guys feel about them?
It depends. On quick inspection if it seems dry or a deep analysis put it off til after the novel. I’m not that worried about spoilers per se, the basic plot of most fiction reprinted with a foreword isn’t exactly a secret, but I’d like my initial impressions to be natural as possible.
While on the subject…Nabokov famously hid the final fate of a few characters in “Lolita” in that book’s fake ‘Foreword’; any reader skipping over the section missed out on a very important plot point.
This little joke of his only works because even in the 1950s readers rushed past the introductory parts on the way to the good stuff. The urge to skip ahead puts you in good company.