I may be a slow learner, because it took me until now to figure out that I shouldn’t read the introductions to novels. I start a book by, let’s say, Truman Capote. The first chapter is by the Reader in Narrative and Translingual Praxis at the Thoreau-Emerson College of the Liberal & Lyric Arts. I dutifully read it because I’m so bourgeois that that I start books on the first page.
It happens every time, and every time I wish I had skipped the introduction and gone straight to Truman Capote or whoever. Until now. From now on, I shall ignore introductions and read only the book I set out to read.
To my mind, which used to be innocent but has become increasingly cynical over several decades of reading introductions, their purpose is to promote the name of the introduction writer by associating it with the novel writer. Helping me to understand or enjoy the rest of the book hardly seems to be a consideration, and in any case, I’d rather not read books that I need to be introduced to in order to comprehend.
It’s a testable hypothesis: Do books with introductions sell better than those without? A simple A-B test could answer this. If there is no difference, it implies that introductions don’t add anything for those who buy the book. As far as I can tell, no-one has done this.
Nehaveigur 