My whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization

Imagine a cheerful crowd of Leib Guard officers invading the imperial kitchens, holding the staff almost at gunpoint. Led, as ever, by Svetogorov, we descended into the basement, unlocked a door to a room, and flipped the lid of a chest to reveal layers of straw that covered perfectly preserved, huge slabs of ice. We whipped out our swords and attempted to hack at it, but the highest-grade imperial ice resisted splendidly. Then Svetogorov found an ice pic, and the next moment, shards of ice flew in all directions as if they were alive and trying to escape. My fellows frolicked after them, but I — I froze. One shard had lodged itself at my feet and lay there waiting. It glittered in the candlelight and it seemed to radiate confidence — a groomed, smooth, mature ice. It could have been old. As old as I. It could been the vary same ice from which Empress Anna's Ice Palace had been built. The ice my parents had lain on. Do they not say that ice has memory? Suddenly, it seemed as if my mind — no, my whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization: if I picked it up, it would become one with me.

— from The Colors of Cold: A New Story from The Age of Ice, by J.M Sidorova.

Summer, sloth, snow

"Summer is no fun without sloth," writes Charles Simic on The New York Review of Books blog. "Indolence requires patience — to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day — and I have none left."

While I have not been very present on this blog of late, it is not due to sloth. Sloth will have to wait a couple more days. I have patience left, just enough.

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One of the hot books to watch for this month, according to io9 (although the commenters are a bit harsher in their assessment), is The Age of Ice, by J.M. Sidorova.

This bizarre historical novel involves a Russian empress who builds a palace out of ice blocks and forces a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester to "marry" there, giving birth to two princes — one of whom discovers later that he's immune to cold. The story of Prince Alexander spans two centuries and three continents, and includes a ton of famous historical figures.

So it's historical fiction, but with a fantasy twist.

There's Russia and there's snow, and these two things in combination call to me.

The Colors of Cold: A New Story from The Age of Ice is available as a free e-book. I snapped it up straight away and I enjoyed it (though I'm not entirely sold on reading a full-length novel in this vein). It definitely reads more like historical fiction than fantasy, but that's not a bad thing.

St. Petersburg in the 1760s was much different than it is now. It was a city cut out generously, for growth, and it had not yet filled its own interstitial spaces. It lay like a fanciful appliqué on the burlap of my country's reality.

The author, a biomedical research scientist, blogs about writing and science at Narratology.

Excerpt.

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I'm still reading Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy. That is, I'd taken a break from it, but on vacation next week I mean to make headway through the second book.

I also picked up some lighter fare, perhaps more appropriate for poolside reading, Louise Penny's Dead Cold.

Ice, ice, cold. Do you see a trend? It's one way to escape the heat.