Skating

Not terribly book related - but I just wanted to say HOORAY! - wasn't that a great Canadian Figure Skating Championship over the weekend? I love this sport and I love the fact that Canadians always do well and are always in the hunt for podium finishes. The 2010 Olympic Games are shaping up to be a repeat of Calgary in 1988, which is tremendously exciting.

Which makes me wonder - has the great figure skating novel been written? Does anyone have a nomination? I can only think of that great scene in Virginia Woolf's Orlando - Orlando and Sasha skating down the frozen Thames:

It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Here was the fretted cross at Charing; there the dome of St Paul's; there the massy square of the Tower buildings; there like a grove of trees stripped of all leaves save a knob at the end were the heads on the pikes at Temple Bar. Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando's fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando's fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually. All the time they seemed to be skating in fathomless depths of air, so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cutting in the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with their skates.