I got very excited in one of the later chapters by a scene in which a character who's fallen on hard times is expecting a visitor and conceals various items in her room which would give a bad impression, like bottles of booze. She also considers hiding 'a candle, not of wax', and I imagined I had stumbled upon a Victorian euphemism for 'dildo'. But alas, someone else's copy had footnotes and I learned that this merely meant it was made of tallow, which was cheaper, further implying how far she had fallen.
The other branch of the Book Club has been reading Sharon Osbourne's autobiography.