Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse. But in the tournament room, Scrabble has nothing to do with vocabulary. If it did, I – an Ivy league-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud – would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.

-Word Freak

I love Scrabble. I've played it since I was kid and I consider myself to be a decent living room player. But I'll never play at the same level at Stefan Fatsis and, honestly, I wouldn't want to—I get hung up on the whole "real word" thing he discusses in the passage above. Nevertheless I love love love Word Freak.

Word Freak chronicles journalist Stefan Fatsis's journey into the world of competitive Scrabble. It's a weird place, populated by all varieties of social miscreants.  Stefan begins at the bottom of the heap, playing the blue hairs—and not always winning, either. He begins studying words, which means memorization, and lots of it. Can you imagine memorizing a list of two-letter words that are valid in Scrabble? And then, when you've finished that, three-letter words? And four, five, etc. There are more words on each list, naturally. It's a Sisyphean struggle for Stefan, although he does make slow progress.

Word Freak is not all about words, though there are certainly plenty of them. Let's get back to those social miscreants, the real heart of the story. It takes a special kind of person to be an expert Scrabble player. Dedicated would be one word for it. Experts could doubtless think of many more, a fair amount of which might be less flattering. But while Stefan's new Scrabble friends may be single-minded in their devotion to the game, they're also pretty fascinating. There's the friendly but ever-ailing "G.I" Joel Sherman (the G.I stands for "gastrointestinal"). There's the funny, hot-headed Matt Graham, who takes smart pills by the handful in order to boost his performance. Matt's friend, Marlon Hill, a smart, temperamental player out of inner-city Baltimore who is working on a book about race in America. And there's Joe Edley, who has mystical approach to Scrabble and coaches Stefan on the psychological aspect of the game.*

There's many more, besides. Some of them, to be fair, seem perfectly well adjusted — but they also get less face time in Word Freak. Stefan is not condescending, although he is honest about the weirdness level, as are many of players. As time wears on, though, and his obsessiveness about the game grows, he finds he has more and more in common with his Scrabble comrades. It might have been a frightening realization to have, but Stefan often finds himself happy with this crowd, playing Anagrams and rehashing games past. They love the game, they truly do.

And I love this book. I enjoy spending time with people who are happy and successful in a way that might not make sense to the rest of the world.  Good for them. And I especially love that this revolves around language, even if many tournament players might not know (or care about) the definitions of the words they play. There is something exciting about finding the perfect word — be it in writing or, when the universe smiles upon upon you, in the mishmash of tiles on your Scrabble rack. I enjoyed celebrating that in Word Freak. It also really, really made me want to play a game of Scrabble.

Up next: For whatever reason, this entry took me forever to write, so I've already finished Tana French's Faithful Place; I imagine I'll be back to write about it soon. I'm planning on starting The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs later this evening.

*If you're curious to see these players in action, the documentary Word Wars covers at least part of the same time period and features many of the same people.