Guest Author - Megan Romer

Stefan Fatsis's 2001 book Word Freak, published by Houghton Mifflin, is a fascinating and thorough look at the game of Scrabble. He covers all aspects of the game, including its history and strategy. Most prominently, though, it covers the modern competitive sport that Scrabble has become. He puts a particularly human touch to the game, its creator and its most famous players.

Fatsis embedded himself into the world of competitive Scrabble to give a real insider's look at the game and its players. He delves into the surprisingly seedy underbelly of the competitive game world and becomes a player himself.

He plays in a series of Scrabble tournaments over more than two years and watches his own skill and strategy grow while building relationships with some of the highest-ranked players in the world.

With his miniature biographies of these players, exposes their stories as well as their strategies. He interviews national and world champions, as well as some of the mid-level players and shows how strategy and skill separate the two. He shows the human side of these players, how the game affects them and why they play it. His profiles, from the bilious (literally) "G.I. Joel" Sherman to the vitamin supplement-popping Matt Graham; from the meditative new-ager Joe Edley to the surprisingly normal young genius Brian Cappelletto.

Because his writing is taken from such a personal standpoint, you find yourself reading about them as though they were carefully crafted fictional characters. You sympathize with their weaknesses, get irritated with their idiosyncrasies and cheer for their victories.

His history of the game is particularly well written, from its humble beginnings as a homemade game sold out of architect and sometime inventor Alfred Mosher Butts's home to its becoming one of the most popular board games in the world.

This book is an excellent read, even for those who may not know much about Scrabble. The high-level strategies are intriguing, and the simple idea of memorizing lists of thousands of words (a must for highly competitive players) is daunting. The book is not a strategy guide, though. Rather, it's a very personable look at the people who play the game and the personalized ways they play it.