A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius [antikvár]

RULES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ENJOYMENT OF THIS BOOK: 1. There is no overwhelming need to read the preface. Really. It exists mostly for the author, and those who, after finishing the rest of the book, have for some reason found themselves stuck with nothing else to read. If you have already read the preface, and wish you had not, we apologize. We should have told you sooner. 2. There is also no overarching need to read the acknowledgments section. Many early readers of this book (see p. xlv) suggested its curtailment or removal, but they were defied. Still, it is not necessary to the plot in any major way, so, as with the preface, if you have already read the acknowledgments section, and wish you had not, again, we apologize. We should have said something. 3. You can also skip the table of contents, if you're short of time. 4. Actually, many of you might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 239—351, which concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time. 5. Matter of fact, the first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with. That gets you to page 123 or so, which is a nice length, a nice novella sort of length. Those first four chapters stick to one general subject, something manageable, which is more than what can be said for the book thereafter. 6. The book thereafter is kind of uneven.