Happy 199th birthday Charles Dickens!

One of my favourite authors. A bit harder to read than Jane Austen because he waffles so long, probably because he wrote books as serials and was therefore paid for the length. But what a storyteller. The modern equivalent are TV shows like Lost, which start off with a simple premise (orphan boy, Scrooge at Christmas, death of a nameless man) and gradually expands on the lives of lots of side characters and weaves them together in backstories and so on, gets really engrossing, and brings everything to a big end. And good characters. With really good names. Lady Deadlock, the Artful Dodger, Bill Sykes.