Did it occur to you that a detail might have both symbolic and practical aspects?

Your professor was not trying to tell you that Bram Stoker chose to have Dracula climb down head first for this one reason and no other. Dracula could have left the castle by any number of creepy means. He could have transformed into a bat, or a mist. He could have jumped out the window and miraculously survived the impact, or floated unnaturally. Instead, Stoker chose a particular image - the count crawling like a lizard. He then described it with a word that was loaded with a suggestive double meaning: not just unnatural, but sexually "unnatural."

There is plenty of textual detail to suggest that sexual threat is a theme in Dracula. It is not at all a stretch to consider that a choice of a significant word might have been made to reinforce that theme.

The Silmarilion is a hard book to love as a casual reader, and that's partly because it was such a labor of love by the author. You need to be as swept up in Middle Earth as Tolkien was to appreciate its every nuance, and if you aren't prepared for it you can easily get overwhelmed by just how much nuance and complexity there is. I'd say that being enchanted by the Lord of the Rings is almost definitely a prerequisite for enjoying this book.

Reading a good book makes me feel connected to other people, like I'm plugged into a whole new way of thinking. Really good books leave me with ideas and concepts that can stay with me forever.

I often feel a little despondent when I haven't read anything in a while. I used to read more than I do now, just as a matter of course. Now life gets in the way, and other pastimes are more convenient. But they don't leave me as satisfied as a good book.

Too Much Monkey Business - Chuck Berry

It's important to remember that the economic forces that have made car ownership so widespread in the present did not exist in most of history, and an entirely different set of forces governed the likelihood of horse ownership or access. Be careful about generalizing too much from the present.

Edit: not that you were explicitly doing this in your post, of course. But I've found that some people tend to assume that, since cars "replaced" horses, then there were as many horses roaming the streets back then as there are cars today.