I forced myself to finish A Study in Scarlet last night. What a chore, and what a bore. It didn't help that the last book I read was a Louis L'Amour novel; Doyle's description of the American West, and the people who lived there is atrocious. The idea that a westerner of that time would leave camp on a hunting trip and get lost because he wasn't watching his backtrail is something only a city dweller could come up with. And the idea of building a big, huge fire in the middle of nowhere, thereby attracting god-knows-who is absurd.
Oh, well; it's the short stories I remember fondly anyway. That and the Hound of the Baskervilles. I won't give up on my revisit to Holmes yet, but this was a bad first step.