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?
I skip them. They are cherry-picked and pointless. I don't care what some person picked by the publisher thinks about the book.