yes! so I was about 3/4 of the way into Moby Dick, and it was one of those brutally drawn-out chapters about the color white, or the size of whale skeletons or something like that, and I needed to look at something else, so I decided to check the introductory text (forward/prologue/whatever) for some backstory about the history of the book/author --I thought it might add context. I figured they probably wouldn't give out plot details, and if they did, I'd recognize most of them early on and know to stop reading.

It was written by Elizabeth Hardwick -a name I'll always remember with passionate hatred -this pretentious, shitty, failed-at-life-so-she-ruins-other-peoples-joy hack put in this intro text that was initialy interesting and filled with backstory about the history of whaling and Melvilles life, and then --boom-- she gives away the crucial ending. i.e. when they eventually find the whale and fight it, who lives and who dies --completely out of the blue like a hidden ambush with no other minor spoilers to serve as a warning. I was horrified and threw the book to the other side of the room but it was too late. I ended up reading the rest of that book out of a sense of obligation, but my heart wasn't really in it. I fucking hate that woman for ruining that story for me. It's still my favourite book, but I will never be able to enjoy it like I could have.

To this day, whenever I buy a classic novel with a prologue written into it by a current author I physically tear those pages out of the book to remove any temptation and start from page 1 of the author's work. It feels painful to damage books like this and friends and family object and say that I'm defacing written works, but I stand firm. Every damn time now. I will never read another forward text again. I still get angry thinking about that.