Notes from the Underground

So I finally finished Madame Bovary. I was so glad to finish that book. It was beautifully written but the main character! She was such a shallow flighty creature. I read the introduction to the book first and it said a little bit about the author and his personal life and lets just say that Flaubert did not have the best opinion of women. The whole time I was reading it I was interpreting Madame Bovary as his view of women and it made me so angry. I could almost see the shadows of the real women she must have be based on behind all the nonsense and theatrics he embodied Madame Bovary with. And than in the end of the book she commits suicide. Suicide isn't something I usually associate with shallow flighty nonsense and theatrics. It is an act of true pain. It was a hard book for me to read and I was glad to get to the last page.
So then I went to the library to pick up the another book from my list. It's kind of a small library so I took the first book on the list that they had available and that was Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. I read the introduction in this book first and it was the worst kind of intellectualized babble. I know that in some circles the introduction would have been very clear and would have given a lot of information and probably fueled an intense dialogue. But I am not a part of that circle! Reading it made me feel stupid and I am not stupid. I am just not educated to that degree. I think when writing an introduction for a book for the general public that the intro should be written with that populace in mind. Otherwise it is condescending and that is rude and in bad taste, in my opinion.
Anyhow after that introduction I was afraid of the book. But I started reading anyhow and it is great. Dostoevsky has a sense of humor and is sarcastic in a way that pleases my own sarcasm. The moral of this rant is don't judge a book by it's introduction.