Lucy's review
Word Freak: A Journey into the Eccentric World of the Most Obsessive Board Game Ever Invented by Stefan Fatsis
i really liked the documentary about the competitive scrabble world, which mostly covered the same players, but this book was so much better. it almost made me want to devote all the time i currently waste procrastinating to memorising lists of words. somehow it seems easier to become obsessed with a fairly pointless goal, like scrabble, rather than anything more productive, like my research. the best parts of this book are the characters, those people for whom scrabble validates their existence. the author became friends with some of the weirdest and manages to convey both their freakiest and most admirable characteristics sympathetically. fatsis himself becomes one of the obsessed and it's fun to follow his journey from ignorant journalist to expert devotee. (i was dorky enough to look up his current ranking, and while he's slipped a little from his end-of-book rating, his involvement in the competitive scrabble world has clearly lasted.) i've been playing too much scrabble against t...more
