Skip the prologue. It never matters.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

I find it hard to skip the prologue. I always want to read it, especially if its a good piece of science fiction. But having said that I skipped the Prologues in David Eddings books. They really are irrelevant.

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You don't stop playing when you get old, you get old when you stop playing!
My musical endeavours on my blog https://mymusictree.blogspot.co.uk/

Depends on the book, surely?

I like to read the foreword, the introduction and the prologue, and the afterword and epilogue as well.
The introduction has always had something useful and helpful to say.

I expect S1m0n reads the epilogues. That seems unbalanced to me.

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Wizard needs whiskey, badly!

I'm reading a novel, not practicing feng shui.

Epilogues tend to tell you what has become of characters that - if the book was any good - by then you have come to care about.

Prologues are mostly just wanking. It's authorial self-indulgence. Rarely do they ever contain any important info you can't figure out by starting at chapter 1, and if they do the writer is incompetent. They're outside the narrative arc, and often contain characters and situations you'll never see again. Why bother? What's left for a prologue to accomplish? A vague sense of scene- and tone-setting, I suppose. But again, if the author has to step out of their narrative to do that, they're no good.

Epigraphs are mostly a waste of typography, too.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

I suspect we may be reading very different books.

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Wizard needs whiskey, badly!