This is an interesting book on how an interest can become an obsession. It's full of interesting facts on the game of Scrabble, but is really more a book on "words". I'd advise you to keep your dictionary handy for looking up all the obscure Scrabble words the author comes up with. It's an entertaining read, and a good insight into how some people live their lives away from the norm.

The only criticisms I have is that this book is very US-centric, and, in a book that focusses so heavily on words, the grammatical and spelling errors really grate. The author also seems unable to distinguish between "English" and "British" which also riles.

However, this is overall an interesting read, and one which is also educational!

BOOKRING PARTICIPANTS

1. Ermintrude75 - Norwich
2. Dododumpling - St. Neots
3. Jalna - Wrexhan
4. Hey-Miki - London
5. Mytliusgirl - Plymouth
6. Jessibud - Canada (Post back to me

RELEASE NOTES:

Sent to Ermintrude75

Yay!! I have been really looking forward to this, as I'm hoping it wll reassure me I'm not really a word freak compared to the guys in this book ;) Thanks GlagowGal.

Wow. I think it's safe to say, Scrabble-lover though I am, I will never make it at a competitive level. I am, and probaly always will be, a "living room player" This book does a very good job of showing the continuous sheer hard work (on top of any natural aptitude) of reading and remembering lists of thousands of words needed to get into the upper echelons, and I think it's telling that few of the players Fatsis enconters from that level seem to have normal jobs and family lives. Not sure how well this observation holds outside the US though - as GlasgowGal says, this is an almost totally US-centric book, probably governed by the fact that they use a different word source from most of the rest of the world, and there is therefore little interplay except at the World Championships.

I was hooked by the story - the author obviously has quite some degree of skill and talent at the game, and his quest to get better and better is grippingly set out, both victories and defeats. I liked the way that stories of his games are interspersed with Scrabble history and chapters on the other players he encounters, making this book accessible and interesting for the rest of us who can only dream of aspiring to AUBERGINES (if you've read the book, you'll understand :).

Off to the next recipient shortly!

Received yesterday. Thank you! I particularly like the cool address label. :)

My husband smirked as I opened the envelope: "Word Freak? Sounds right up your street!" I'm looking forward to reading this and should be able to make a start at the weekend.

"In a way, the living room player is lucky. He has no idea how miserably he fails with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed."

Oh so true! I had no idea that words such as TOKAMAK or OQUASSA existed, and not a clue that BRR and PFFT were allowed! In addition, I've learned about the history of the game; the differences in the way US and British players, and male and female players, approach the game; the uproar caused when certain "offensive terms" were removed from the official dictionary; even the rules to which Orthodox Jews adhere if they wish to play in a Scrabble tournament on the Sabbath. Most of all though, I learned that Scrabble isn't just about the words, which is what I (naïve "living room player" that I am) assumed. To be a true "tilehead" you need:

"math aptitude, language facility, competetive drive, predisposition toward obsession ... gift of memory, spatial perception, monkish discipline"

This book offers an insight into a world I knew nothing about, there's a cast of fascinating characters and the chapters about tournaments contain an element of paciness and tension that made me want to keep turning the pages.

Thanks for sharing, GlasgowGal!

Will be popped in the post to Jalna today.

Now that I've managed to reduce the flow of Rings and Rays to a mere trickle, they tend not to arrive here in groups, but instead each one arrives the day after I've started reading another book! However, in this case I am not fully "into" the other book yet and am so keen to read this that I am going to start it straight away. (I still bitterly regret that they didn't continue showing Scrabble on the television!)

Incidentally, I think the cover on this edition is very cleverly designed and much more appropriate than the one in the illustration above!

I'm sorry folks, but I just couldn't get through this one! I really expected to like it, but I'm afraid I just got very bored by the time I'd done 5 chapters, and when another Inspector Lynley book arrived this morning I knew it was time to abandon it.

Perhaps if I was a faster reader I would have sooner got on to more interesting chapters, but as far as I got it just seemed to be re-hashing the same weird characters in different slightly weird situations.

I sent the book off to Hey-Miki on 2 December.

Ooh, I like the look of this book!
Co-incidentally, last night I saw a documentary called "Lost For Words" about scrabble enthusiasts. It's probably the tv equivalent of this book (and really nicely done). The author was one of the people they interviewed.
I'm more into the game "anagrams" (which uses scrabble letters and is much easier to play) than scrabble but maybe this book will convert me...

Like Jalna, I found the pace of this book tedious at the start. All the scabble-specific detail didn't interest me much - not being a scrabble player (I've never actually played a proper game of it in my life). But as the author charted his progress through the ranks of competitive scrabble, his obsessiveness became quite contagious! I knew I was hooked when I found myself reading about the World Scrabble Championship with bated breath. Quite a shocker.

I read most of this while on holiday in Budapest for 4 days. By the time I got home I was gagging for a game! So I persuaded my boyfriend to play a round last weekend. We started at 8:30 - planning to be finished by 9:30 to go to a party. Unfortunately we never made it to the party. The game took 3 hours! :-S
I won with a very respectable score of 382 and was very chuffed. I managed to turn "EXCITE" into "EXCITERS" (which wasn't in our dictionary but it was on dictionary.com so we let it pass), hitting a triple-word square. And I also got a bingo: "ADRENAL" for 81 points! How proud was I?! (Thanks to my very patient boyfriend for lettingly me head-scratch over my rack for so long). I think this may be the start of something beautiful...

But back to the book. It was very entertaining by the time I got into it. I was interested to hear about all the characters Stefan hung out with. And the various scrabble tips that cropped up turned out to be handy! Shame about all the typos - and in a word-game book too - surely that's asking for trouble?! It was very impressive the way Stefan managed to become a real "expert". I wonder if he still competes?
(A quick google didn't answer that question but it did turn up this interview )

Thanks for a great find GlasgowGal! It's off to Mytilusgirl now.

Arrived today. I'll be starting this tonight.

Thanks!

Good grief! I had no idea that the world of competitive scrabble was so cut throat.

I didn’t actually enjoy the book, and I guess it’s here that I ought to confess that I only made it halfway through. I kept hoping it would pick me up and engross me, instead, most of the various players that the author encountered annoyed me intensely! I honestly wonder how people like these manage to make their way through life.

Still, I loved the words and have added a few to my repertoire (if only I can remember them!).

Thank you for sharing GlasgowGal!

I’ve got Jessibud’s address and will be posting it on, or by Saturday.

Cheers!

I received this book today, only 6 days after it was mailed from the UK!


I look forward to reading this as I am a Scrabble fiend (not a great player, but I love it, nonetheless!).


I will journal again once I'm done. Thanks for including me in this ring

I love playing Scrabble. We played in our home as I was growing up and I play it now, online, juggling 5 or 6 games at a time with far-flung friends. When I first caught sight of this book, I wanted to read it immediately. Now that I'm done, I will say that I learned some things that I never knew. And I had some things that I did know, confirmed for me. I can tell you for sure that I am not now, never have been and have no desire whatsoever to ever become, a competitive Scrabble player. Stefan Fatsos, the author, is an eloquent writer who depicts all sides of the game, the players and the world of competitive Scrabble. It isn't a pretty picture, at least, not to my mind. In fact, I found it so unpleasant (and in truth, uninteresting) that after the first chapter, I found myself skimming, then later, totally skipping, every chapter that dealt with the actual plays, words, games and players.

From the beginning of the book:
"...[There] seems to be an important distinction between the Scrabble pro and the hobbyist. The pro, with his board vision and word knowledge, understands that the act of selecting tiles randomly from a bag is a crapshoot...."

"...For now, though, I understand only that while definitions can be interesting, they're not necessary. It's just about impossible to play high-level (or even low-level) competitive Scrabble if you're hung up on the game's use of odd words. The two most common refrains of living room players are the incredulous "That's a word?" and the indignant "That can't be a word!" Because how can something be a word if I've never seen it before? The answer, I decide early on, is that there are lots and lots of words (hundreds of thousands , actually) that even the most highly-educated person doesn't know.
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 vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse.....[competitive Scrabble] isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules."


The parts that truly did hold my interest and fascinated me were the chapters on the history of the game, how it came to be, how it evolved from its inception to its present form. It's also a rather sad story but rivetting. When Fatsos describes (in chapter 7) his trip to the Mecca of Scrabble, Butts' house in the rural area of Stanfordville, New York, it was almost like accompanying him and seeing what he saw. It's a heartbreaking story, this life of Alfred Butts.

"...There comes a time in any obsession when you have to learn more. It doesn't much matter whether the object of an obsession is a person, a sports car, a football team, or a board game.You just do.You need to see the shrinking world into which you are being sucked as a fully formed whole....To do that, I need to answer the question: Who was Alfred Butts?
In lore, Butts is the unemployed architect who invented Scrabble as a none-too-bright get-rich-quick scheme during the Depression. I don't know how embellished the myth is, but I need more than facts. I want to know if Butts sensed he was inventing the most sophisticated board game of modern times, a worthy companion to chess and backgammon, which had centuries-old pedigrees. I want to know if he consulted dictionaries, if he marvelled at the geometric forms of juxtaposed letters, if he loved words. I want to know, in short, if he was one of us.

"...Page after page after page of tattered, fraying paper with the notations of a bean counter spill from the Archives. I imagine tiny Alfred, who looks so meek in photographs, balding and bespectacled, like an expressionless Don Knotts, hunched over some newspaper or magazine in the fifth-floor walkup in Queens, counting letters. It wouldn't have mattered to the success or marketability of his game whether there were ten or eleven or fifteen E's. But Butts's perfectionist mind insisted that he figure it out. That the game be *right* was paramount...
"...Perfection isn't arrived at overnight, and the more I play, the more Alfred's game seems perfect. I think he was like Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbocker Base Ball Club playing the bases ninety feet apart or James Naismith setting the height of his peach baskets at ten feet. The distances and location of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas de deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward..."


Fatsos also quotes Roz Grossma, 72 years old and one of the original tournament players in New York in the 1970's. She once wrote a poem "a paean to Scrabble" that was published in Games magazine:

"I hate to play Scrabble with people who babble.
My psyche gets balky when they become talky.
I hate to play Scrabble with people who dabble
In encyclopedias.
I think they are tedious.
I hate to play Scrabble with people who wabble
All over the board until they have scored.
But I love to play Scrabble with my kind of rabble.
We're not erudite but we keep our mouths quite
Shut.
We keep the game moving.
Hell, what are we proving?"



On that note, I will say that while I cheated by not reading the entire book, I really did enjoy the parts I read.

On its way home now to GlasgowGal. Thanks for including me in this bookring!!

This has now made it back safe and sound to Glasgow. Many thanks to all who read and looked after my book.
:-)

RELEASE NOTES:

Going to the BCUK Unconvention

Picked up at the BookCrossing UK Unconvention in Birmingham.

I enjoyed this. It was fun tale of one man's attempt to get somewhere on the competitive Scrabble hierarchy. I already knew that "Britney Spears" was an anagram of "Presbyterians", but I was delighted to discover that "Eric Clapton" is an anagram of "narcoleptic"! And even our very own Countdown TV show gets a mention!

Updated 23 February: On its way to AmyMS88 after spotting it on her wishlist.

Got this today, thanks so much for sharing it! I've been wanting it for a while but never got around to getting it. I'll definitely have to think of a good place to release it when I'm done, or maybe do another ring.

Thanks again, Gothmarcus, please let me know if you ever see anything on my shelf you'd like to have!

Wow, I used to think I had a fairly decent vocabulary. I read a lot and used to do spelling competitions in school, so I learned a lot of words and origins, etc doing that. This book proves I really don't... There were a multitude of words I didn't know - especially the 2 letters and the bingos!

Anyway, thanks again for sharing! I'm mailing it out ot PrettyPoodle today.

OOOH I was so excited when I opened the package that this came in today! Thank you so much! I can not wait to read this!

During the very first chapter I was ready to give up on this book. I just did not care for it. I decided to give it more of a chance and kept reading. Sadly my first impressions were correct and I just really did not care for this at all. I finally gave up after a few more chapters.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I am going to a new OBCZ for the first time and I want to bring some books to share. This is one of those books.

Congratulations! You have not only found yourself a book, but a whole community of booklovers dedicated to sharing books with each other & the world at large.

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