An (Op) Writer's Companion (Chick Wit: Over 1000 wisecracks from 21st Century Women - Jasmine Birtles)

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Chick Wit: Over 1000 wisecracks from 21st Century Women - Jasmine Birtles
Date:	30/05/09 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, irrelevant book, useful for reference, cheap

Disadvantages: Not the most profound words ever spoken

Chick Wit is a compendium of over 1000 quotations from modern women - in other words, an up to date, female take on a traditional dictionary of quotations.

It's probably not that usual to sit down and read a book of quotations from cover to cover, but that's something you can do with this one. This is true for a mixture of reasons: the quotes are fairly modern (80s and 90s up to a few from the year of publication, 2004) so haven't been reproduced to death yet. The authors are in general women who are in the public eye, and so familiar to their readers. Instead of long, cleverly thought out insights into some feeling or thought or process from people with silly names who you could never pick out of a line up (Aristotle, Galileo, various biblical types, that elusive Anon) this book is filled with short little sound bites from the type of people you're likely to see lolling around the pages of Heat magazine - Christina Aguilera, Victoria Beckham, Catherine Zeta Jones, Angelina Jolie.

"I have to be seen to be believed" - Queen Elizabeth II

The quotes are in general only a dozen words or so, and tend to circulate around the less worldly important but equally incredibly vital to some people subjects of looks, clothes, men, money, sport, drink, motherhood, sex, animals, marriage, sex with animals as a result of marriage....you get the picture. Each main category, of which there are 5, is further subdivided by subject to give you a total of 30 sections. Some are bigger than others (there's a lot to say on sex, less so about the potential product thereof: childhood), but all have at least a satisfactory selection of quotes to run your eyes over. They're generally light hearted, witty words of wisdom on the various topics, and as such reading them just for the sake of reading is possible and amusing.

"I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking" - Dorothy L Sayers

I like to use quotations in my ops - as titles, or paragraph headers or just to get across a feeling on the item I'm writing about. Some of these I've heard again and again. Some I find in my day to day reading. Some, helpful well trained mothers send to you with a note suggesting its use in one of your pieces (see Freya Stark's mumblings in my opinion of Chicago's Cass Hotel). When none of these sources will do, and you just need a quote, books dedicated to them come in handy. I have a traditional one of these, but it was becoming old which I why I bought this when I saw it in a cheap bookshop for a relatively insignificant £1.99.

"In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular" - Kathy Norris

The book has a rrp of £6.99 but is on Amazon for a penny. It is not worth the full price in my mind, since a few hours hard work and you could have pulled together a similar list for yourself from the various (free) quotation sites on the net. However as I said earlier, I bough this for a couple of quid in my local cheap bookshop, and that to me seemed like a good deal. As well as being categorised by subject, the quotes are also sorted by author in the index so if there's a particular person whose style you like, you can skip straight to their words.

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I haven't tried before" - Mae West

You could probably argue that everything true and worth saying about life, the universe and everything has already been said many, many times. But people are coming out with random, entertaining thoughts every day, so I see no reason to ignore a modern book that pulls together a lot of these thoughts, neatly subcategorises them and presents them for your reading pleasure. While Jennifer Lopez and her thoughts on divas might not go down in the history books as the most insightful words of her generation, they're appropriate and applicable now, and thus worth recording. There is an obsession with celebrity like never before, and documenting the weird little mutterings this sub-set of society frequently comes out with seems as valid an idea as any for passing the time.



ISBN: 1853755389

Summary: Second hand, it's worth having