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Urgh. My mom's phone call was somehow the catalyst that has made me grumpy and mad and frustrated. I feel like I'm too fat, I'm eating too much and too frazzled and tired and lazy to exercise, I haven't been putting in many hours at the bookstore, the boy is not here, my face is breaking out, I've found two new moles and am freaking out about those, my new pants are tight, the house is a mess, and why in the name of all that is holy does my mom keep pestering me to either cook or exercise?? Why does this matter so much to her? Why does she think I have to cook, even though I am tired and frazzled when I get home from work and all I want to do is microwave something at the most? And why can't she stop carping on my weight?

And why hasn't Amazon shipped my ROTK:EE, which I desperately want to watch before I leave for home, or at least so I can bring it home and watch it on a nicer TV?

Must do too many things before I leave for home, and I'm tired and frustrated and want to do nothing but sleep.

Argh. This message has been brought to you by That Time of Month, along with the letter Q.

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I really want to sit down and write out a book post on Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy, which I loved, btw, and which made me snort repeatedly in laughter. Does anyone laugh in a dignified manner? I half want to learn how and I half don't, because I feel like laughing is one of those things that should supercede dignity. Still. It's a good thing no one was around me while I was reading this.

But I don't have the book next to me, and it's a book I really want to pull quotes from.

Then I was going to whine a great deal about the holidays and feeling rather left out of them, which is stupid, because I'm going home. But it's rather weird seeing all these gifts and decorations and the like going up and knowing that I'm not going to be here. And that my family is very likely not doing anything spectacular for Christmas, besides the giant Christmas party with all the old family friends that isn't so much a celebration of Christmas so much as using Christmas as a giant excuse to get together and celebrate the fact that the kids are back from America.

Aaand, hey, it's almost time for the office party and gift exchange thing. Any excuse to not do work is of the good!

Cushman, Karen - Catherine, Called Birdy

After seeing oracne and coffee_and_ink's conversation here, I remembered that I had Catherine, Called Birdy stashed away on one of my shelves and went to dig it out, because I was in the mood for something funny.

It's a marvelous book on a year in the life of Birdy, the daughter of a minor noble in medieval England, written in diary form. Birdy is rude, hates her embroidery, and must marry one of the loathsome suitors that her father (the Beast) keeps shoving at her. I know the bare bones sounds much like any YA book aimed toward a female audience, but there's incredible depth and realism in this book, and I can't begin to say how much I enjoyed it. I don't know that much about the time period, but Cushman's depiction feels very real to me. She doesn't skimp on the dirt and the squalor, but she manages to do so in a way that makes it feel ordinary, because Birdy, of course, doesn't think anything of it.

Birdy herself is a wonderful heroine and has a very individual and distinctive voice throughout her diary entries:

(on deciding the proper curse) I have chosen. God's thumbs! What a time I have had in deciding. I chose God's thumbs because thumbs are such important things and handy to use. I thought to make a list of all the things I could not do without my thumbs, like writing, plaiting my hair, and pulling Perkin by his ear, but now it seems to me to be a waste of paper and ink, for I can think of no purpose for such a list unless some heathen Turk came from across the sea and threatened to cut off my thumbs with his golden sword and I was able to convince him to spare my thumbs by reading him my list of how important thumbs are, but since it seems unlikely both that a Turk would threaten my thumbs and that such a list would stop him if he did, I shall save the time and the ink and not make a list.

I mentioned before that I emitted quite a few rather unseemly laughs while reading this (luckily alone in bed in the middle of the night, so no one could hear me snorting and making very weird sounds because Birdy is very funny). Another small bit I like is that the diary actually sounds like a diary. Sometimes, especially in epistolary novels, the letters and diaries begin to sound more like first-person POV narratives instead of like letters and diaries that normal people write, but Birdy has days in which she can't write, days in which she goes off on long tangents, and other assorted randomness. I think when I tried to read it before around high school, I was a little put off by that, but now it feels more comforting than anything else. I think I'm too used to reading LJ ;).

I could say more on how the book manages to have a very active and independent heroine without ever seeming anachronistic and how that shows off the skill of the author, as well as adding in more on how this is a great example of historical fiction that does that tightrope walk between cultural influence and individual personality with elan, but you should just go read the book instead. It will be much more fun than reading my post anyway.

I ended up buying Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice and The Ballad of Lucy Whipple on the strength of this book.