Lady Audley's Secret
If this book hadn't been a pick for my book club, I doubt I would have finished it. The ending lasted longer than Return of the King 's. It's not that this book was bad. In fact it was a lot more readable than I expected it to be. Especially after I gave up on Middlemarch last month. But it is so far outside my normal wheelhouse. A sensation novel from the 1860s that moves impossibly slow for my more modern sensibilities. And completely predictable to boot. But getting exposure to stuff like this is why I joined a book club in the first place. There were some highlights. Lady Audley, the villainess of the piece, is nearly sympathetic until she basically throws it all away in the end. She was so close to escaping scot free. But we can't have that. So her nephew, who spends the book investigating the disappearance of his friend and having long-winded inner monologues about women, convinces her to confess her sins and locks her away in a mad house. And everyone exce...