Of logs and reading

Now I know what a reading log is  :)  and I'm doing my first one here today.  And I have to keep a reading log for my Intro to Fiction class from now to March 25---this is not a fiction!---so that will be my blog for the next ten weeks or so.
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7:56 p.m. Wrote intro (above).  Decided to wait until "Achy breaky heart" (playing on YouTube) ends.

7:58 p.m.  Song over.  Checked the table of contents:  The fourth chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles is 12 pages long (in my copy).

8:00 p.m.  I wish I had an estimate of how long that will take me to read.

8:01 p.m.  Found the page and started reading.

8:02 p.m.  Counted five hyphenated words in the first paragraph:  breakfast-table, dressing-gown, dark-eyed, ruddy-tinted, weather-beaten.  Wondered about "eye-brows" and "bear-ing" as well (those two are hyphenated at ends of lines).

8:06 p.m.  Where Doyle writes dialogue, the text reads like a play with the stage directions inadverently left out.

8:07 p.m.  It's hard to read without background music.  Started playing "Call Me Maybe" on YouTube.  Wondering whether anything I've read so far should be the gap I'd use for Monday's Step paper.

8:10 p.m.  Spotted wordplay:  Sir Henry says, "... I've heard of the hound ever since I was in the nursery.  It's the pet story of the family ..."  pet story  :)

8:11 p.m.  Internal front rhyme  :)  "We heard the steps of our visitors descend the stair and the bang of the front door.  In an instant Holmes had changed from the languid dreamer to the man of action."  bang/languid, plus their front eye rhyme with changed.

8:15 p.m.  But why "We heard the steps of our visitors descend the stair and the bang of the front door" and not "We heard the steps of our visitors descend the stair and the front door bang"?

8:28 p.m.  I give up.  I'll just read on.

8:34 p.m.  Done.  "A clever man upon so delicate an errand has no use for a beard save to conceal his features"---quote for McDaniel  :)  Cigarette break.

8:40 p.m.  Found possible explanation:  The parallelism works better when the second element is longer, as in "We heard the steps of our visitors descend the stair and the carved oaken front door open, then shut with a resounding bang that echoed back into the room" or something.  The door had to be the second element because the elements are ordered by time of occurrence, and is shorter in order to avoid unnecessary detail (as in the text), so it was probably better to leave out the parallelism.

8:49 p.m.  Also found a good reason to not start the next chapter right away:  The chapters were serialized in the monthly Strand Magazine, so I shouldn't read two chapters in a row if I want to approximate the experience of one of the original readers  :)  Will grade Math quizzes instead.  More later.