Reading notes: 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'

This is another "yep, something that is supposed to be good is in fact good" book... ...But I think it'll be a little while before I pick up another Sherlock Holmes book. The characters, or at least the characters of Holmes and Watson, hold up wonderfully well. (I wonder if mystery plots decay a bit faster than we generally think. I'd conjecture that, although one standard view is that these plots are driven by logic and therefore relatively timeless, in fact they rely on a lot of contingencies of culture, psychology, and physical context.) It's heartening to see just how much Holmes emphasizes patience, epistemic care, and the willingness to memorize things in the name of professional fluency. ("Come on, Watson, any real pro knows a bit about the 75 most common perfumes and can recognize them instantly.")