Orlando: A Biography

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner...
The new king...directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park of pleasure ground...Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder... Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.

--Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

What a glorious, splendid book! What wit, what cleverness, what sass! I shan't tell you what it's about; you must read it for yourself and discover for yourself all the beauty, the audacity, the most pleasant of surprises!

You should read Orlando while leaning against an oak tree. You should read it by the ocean. You should read it with flowers nearby. You should read it by candlelight. You should take a glass of wine with this book; in some parts a cup of coffee would not go amiss. But don't drink tea with this book; Orlando detests tea.