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Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stefan Fatsis

This would be about three great, compelling, magazine articles.

• The process the author went to in the course of improving himself from gifted amateur status to expert in the competitive Scrabble circuit.
• Any of the rather "curious" personalities at the super-expert levels in the competitive Scrabble circuit.
• How competitive Scrabble feels like the perversion of the game, where a large working vocabulary is less important than the memorisation of talmudic rules for playable letter sequences.
• The nutty techniques that take players from being good "living room players" to the sort that have a shot at winning the tiny purses at Scrabble tournaments.

Each of these themes could support a long magazine article of anywhere from three to fifteen pages, probably sorted from longest-legged to shortest.

As a 400-page book, though? Not quite.

I read it, and I didn't put it down unfinished, but it felt like work, and I wished for the end on multiple occasions. To its credit, it is very lucidly written, so it's quite accessible, the primary reason, I think, that I didn't put it down. However, I did take many, many breaks to play Scrabble against my computer, because the book is quite inspiring in terms of word play, tedious and over-detailed though it may be.

The reason I had to play against the computer is that Kat knew better, she could tell that I wanted to try out my new "bingo"-heavy strategy, instead of the typical amateurish pattern of holding the wrong tiles too long in the hopes of a low-probability, high-scoring, word. ("ah, I have E-R-S-A-T-Y-Q, I just need Z for 'ersatz'!") In that way, I'd really like to have read this in Esquire or the New Yorker instead of spending the time reading a book-length treatment.

Wait for excerpts, as I'm sure they're coming.