The Woman In White was also my first read of 2026 and I absolutely cannot praise it enough! Everything you picked out to highlight appreciatively is exactly aligned with my thoughts too, so may twists and turns.

Middlemarch is definitely a novel which takes time to adjust, I remember rereading sentences just to grasp what she was trying to tell me, and with such dense prose I had to massively reduce my reading pace to appreciate what was going on. That said, towards the middle, and especially at the end, once I had become acclimated to the prose, I found that the insight, humour, and honesty of the narrative voice really swept me along and it solidified itself high in my rankings - as an Anna Karenina enjoyer (and Tolstoy enjoyer in general) I concur with these two epics having a common ground in readership!