winter reading

Looking for answers I am reading Winter World, by Bernard Heinrich. I've not discovered the secret of deer winter watering holes, but I did find out why ice doesn't sink:

There is something quite remarkable, simple, and yet profoundly important that happens when water turns to ice in a pond. Compare this with what happens when water turns to ice in a cloud. In a cloud, the ice crystals fall because water and ice are heavier than air and the gas phase of water. However water becomes lighter when it transforms from a liquid to a solid state.

Is that something I should have known?

 I just finished rereading The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. Oh, that man can write.

Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. 

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Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

I keep thinking about the phrase "appalling, barnacled old first paragraph". The brilliant use of the word barnacled. I've read most of Ondaatje's books, but not In the Skin of a Lion. That's next.