Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players
Date Finished: 4/20/06

I've been reading. I've been busy. I haven't been writing.

I read this book because the fantastic Mrs. M-MV mentioned it on her always inspiring blog. The author, Stefan Fatsis, took up Scrabble in a serious way, taking a leave of absence from his job at The Wall Street Journal to memorize words (not just any words, only those from The Official Tournament and Club Word List are acceptable in competitive play), study strategy, and travel to tournaments. There are Scrabble tournaments you ask? Yes. Yes, there are and Fatsis tells you about them, faithful reader. In detail.

Fatsis stretches his experience from meaty-article to book-manuscript length by including stories about the history of Scrabble, both its invention and the evolution of tournaments, as well as the personal stories of selected players. It is frightening to note that most of the players Fatsis profiles are not far from living in a Van! Down by the River! Quitting your job to play Scrabble full time seems awfully odd until you read about other players who don't exactly have jobs. Instead, they live with their mothers or bounce from venture to venture or collect disability and write letters to the Scrabble newsletter complaining about inclusion or exclusion of certain words in the game.

To his credit, Fatsis is clear-eyed about his obsession with increasing his Scrabble rating. He realizes that it is just a game, and yet, he can't shake the desire to become an elite player and compete with the big boys. He even admits that the story book ending would be for him to play in the highest class at the National Scrabble Championship and rally to beat one of the top players who he befriended during his journey. That doesn't happen. Instead, he plays in the second class at the Nationals and finishes 51st out of 105 players. He then goes on to end his story with these sentences from the epilogue, after resuming his job and social life and then playing badly in a tournament, causing his rating to slip: "It's a number I can't live with. The next morning, on the subway to work, I whip out a list of five-letter words, and the cycle begins anew."

I admit that I considered buying a Scrabble set after reading this book. I also admit that the story bogged down for me in the middle when Fatsis spent several chapters discussing the evolution of competative play. What interested me were the stories of the players and why they felt compelled to do Scrabble the way that they do. Fatsis's willingness to explore his own reasons for his obsession kept me going with this book, as I waited to see whether he would emerge from the tiles and word lists and pick up his "normal" life again. As the ending of the book reveals, he did and he didn't. And that, faithful reader, is something I like in a story.