I decided to read Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and as usual I read the introduction first. It was written by some English teacher somewhere. I would like to say the following:
Attention introduction writers, an introduction does not need thirty pages. It took me three bus trips to get through this before getting to the actual novel that I paid for. It would be enough just to give a short bio of the author, and his or her situations and intentions at the time of writing so that the reader can understand some nuances in the work that they might otherwise miss.
Also, you can discuss a scene or two from the book, but PLEASE do not include spoilers! I am aware that East of Eden is a classic, but not everyone knows how certain classics turn out.
Maybe it is better to read afterwords, rather than introductions, but there isn’t always one to be had. Skipping the introduction until after I’ve read the book might be the way to go.
You have permission to read any book any way you want to, including back to front. Once you started to read the intro and didn’t like it, you should have skipped it.
One of the women in my book club read Cloud Atlas as follows: The first chapter, then the last chapter. Then the second chapter, then the penultimate chapter. Then the third chapter, then the third-to-last chapter, and so on. The book made more sense to her than others who read it straight through. I read it straight through and loved it. But then I like surprises.
My late husband was the son of a grade school teacher and he had been raised with many rigid, limiting rules about how books should be read. If you have some of those rules, get rid of them. Now.
BTW I adore East of Eden and believe it is one of the best novels ever written. It might be The Great American Novel.
I have a copy of The Haunting of Hill House that has a massive foreword full of spoilers like that. I’ve thought about cutting it out, but it would ruin the binding. I’d certainly never loan that copy to anyone who hadn’t read it before.
I have read introductions, but I don’t read them before I’ve read the book unless they are in a first edition and unlikely to spoil the book.
I have Ender’s Game and I never read the intro in my copy until later. It didn’t spoil it, but it did make hints or even put ideas out there that would have affected my, totally 100% unspoiled, reading of it.
Yeah, sometimes “classics” get published with a scholarly introduction that apparently assumes that people reading it are already familiar with the book, and those kinds of introductions really need to be afterwords instead.
I recently tried to reread Proust’s Swann’s Way. The introduction was very helpful in explaining how this new translation made the book more readable. Spoiler: I made it to about pg. 150.
Tolkien’s Silmarillion is one of my favorite books, but whenever I recommend it to anyone, I recommend that they be very quick to skip over the Valaquenta and Ainulindalë if they find that they’re boring them, and get straight on to the proper narrative part. For my own part, I think it took me a half-dozen attempts to get through those before I succeeded, and then read the rest straight through.
The book adaptation of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) parodies this to great effect. There’s a foreword to the foreword, the foreword, an afterword to the foreword, a foreword by each of the individual cast members, a foreword by Shakespeare himself (in which he gives special thanks to the Dark Lady), and finally a foreword by the reader in which you demand that they cut it out with the endless introductions and get to the text.
It is my considered opinion that no literary work has ever been improved by having an English professor analyze it before or during your first reading of it.
Good for you, I never read them.
Same for the “Dramatis Personae” sections, boring, spoiler filled waste of pages if you ask me.
Maaaaay be if there are too many characters in your book and you want to add a quick reference guid, put it at the end.
But if you need a dramatis personae to help you through the book, you need to know it’s there.
On the general issue, the worst example I have was the intro to The Maltese Falcon, published by the Folio Society. Gave away the ending in the first paragraph.
I recall at least a few cases in high school English where we were assigned a book to read and the teacher specifically instructed us not to read the intro until after we had finished the book.
Easily fixed with a note at the beginning saying something like “A dramatis personae is available at the end if you need it”
I may be biased because I’ve never needed one, while in real life I forget people names who’ve been just introduced to me, I was able to read both The Silmarillion and One Hundred Years of Solitude without losing track of who was whom.
Writers of introductions seem unable or unwilling to avoid spoilers, so I always skip them, and then go back to skim or read them after finishing the book. Most or all of them really do make better afterwords.