I learned a hard lesson about Introductions and Prefaces.

Years ago I was going to read "The Nature of the Gods" by Cicero. I was really looking forward to it. I bought a copy printed by Penguin, so I knew it would be a good translation. There was a long introduction at the beginning, and I wanted to read the book "properly", and not jump around or skip stuff. The introduction was around seventy (yes, 70) pages long and was a bit out of my depth. I slogged through the seventy pages, page after painful page. Not knowing what the point was or where this introduction was supposed to take me. I found myself counting how many more pages I had to read before I could get to the actual work of Cicero.

When I finally got done reading the Introduction, I put the book down and didn't continue. I was burned out. This happened around 25 years ago, and I still never returned to the book. I should probably read it one of these days, but I've got bigger fish to fry right now.