Still chugging through Dickens. I'm over half way now, and there are numerous characters that I truly don't care about one bit and am getting pretty annoyed by. Luckily, people are starting to die, rather than new folks getting introduced - hopefully this trend will continue and I'll have fewer characters to keep track of in the second half of the book!

In the meantime, I heard this on The Writer's Almanac this morning: the 2 tidbits in red were choice, I thought, and shed some light on James.

It's the birthday of the novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.

At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.

But he wrote almost 10 million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

He became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain in World War I. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ April 15, 2008