Rating: 
Summary: fun but fizzles a bit
Review: This is an entertaining book, but I found the style some what off putting. I recommend it to anyone who has ever played scrabble, although I'm not sure it will leave you wanting to play when you've finished!
Rating: 
Summary: Now I know I'm not a Word Freak
Review: Until I read this book, I thought I was a word junky--crossword puzzles, palindromes, obscure vocab words, etc. Now I know I can't compare to this cast of colorful characters whose idea of an entertaining evening is anagramming twelve letter words.
It is unbelieveable that a subculture like this exists. The next time I'm in Washington Square Park, I'm going to see if any of these guys are there. Are they rude if you watch? I haven't played scrabble in years, but as I read the book, I could barely contain myself from dragging out the old maroon scrabble game (circa 1955) and trying for a bingo. I can't ever remember bingoing before, but after reading the book, I knew my chances were good. I drew the tiles, agonized, rearranged the rack, and there it was! I drew seven more tiles, agonized again, and made an eight letter bingo. Read the book. You will love these people.
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: You would think that after reading pages and pages anagrams, bingoes and lots of new words, I could have come up with something more than WOW! for a title. Truth be told, my head is just swimming with information gleaned from this book. I am what is considered a "hobbyist" not a competative Scrabble player. Before reading this book I thought maybe one day I would like to be one, but after reading about the thousands of words, anagrams, lists etc. that these people need to study and master, I'll pass. It was fascinating and highly entertaining to read about the world these "professionals" live in. Fatsis presents the characters and their quirks in such a way you feel like you really know these people. Additionally, the information on the history of the game from its inception to the varitey of corporations who have owned and manufacutured Scrabble games over the years is very thorough and interesting. Because the author frequently puts words that were used in Scrabble games he or others in the book played in all capitals with lower case letters used to denote tiles that already existed on the board with asterisks denoting phoney words, dollar signs denoting words used in American Scrabble and pound signs denoting Brittish Scrabble words thing can sometimes become confusing if not hard on the eyes. Eyestraining as it may be, this does not take away any of the credit this book deserves. There were many times I wanted to put the book down to go play a quick game of Scrabble on my CD-Rom (which as I suspected and has now been confirmed, cheats!) or call a friend over to play, but the book was just too good to put aside. Even for a casual living room player like me this was an excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: Will the movie be better?
Review: The fact that this book is being made into a movie should tell you that it has captured the attention of the non-player. (It really is -- check with Hollywood insiders.) After the movie, I suspect sales of this book to rise dramatically. Fatsis, despite his not-quite championship level Scrabble play, is going to be a huge winner in end. Yes, I'd recommend this book. You seriously can't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I start from two premises: 1. That not everyone in the world would naturally be interested in book on competitive Scrabble, particularly one that delves so deeply into lexical matters. 2. That if anyone who has not read the book is reading its reviews on Amazon, then they would likely not fall into the first category and would love this book as I did. The amount of work that went into this book was truly impressive, not only in terms of research but in terms of the amount of work Fatsis had to do in a very short time to make himself an expert player. As one person analogized at the end of the book--it's like someone taking up golf for the first time and becoming a 5-handicapper within a year. I also liked the way that he did not sugar-coat any of his portrayals of his fellow Scrabble players (or of himself), but despite that honesty, there is never any nastiness towards his subjects. The honesty is combined with compassion. Finally, I enjoyed the author's questioning of himself as to whether he himself was becoming one of the Scrabble weirdos (a word I don't believe he ever used himself, but certainly may as well have) as he delved deeper and deeper into the game and its subculture. But the fact that that while he may have become like some of them on some levels, the transformation was never complete. For one thing, who among them could have written such an excellent book? Being an expert tournament player means that you know how to lay your tiles on the board. It does not mean that you know how to lay them out in a book in the palmary fashion Fatsis does here.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read Even For Living Room Players
Review: I couldn't put this book down. Stefan Fatsis gave me a tour of competitive Scrabble that I will never forget. He convinced me that I don't want to pursue it as a profession, however, I now feel compelled to work on my skills as a hobbyist up a notch or two.... His coverage of the game is only outdone by his coverage of the players as multi-faceted human beings. I even started having Scrabble dreams.
Rating:
Summary: They are us!
Review: I have just finished reading some of the reviews of Mr. Fatsis' book and am struck by the oft stated idea that the Scrabble players portrayed in this book are very different from the rest of us. Nay. They are "the rest of us" who have gone a bit further and, in many cases, quite inventively found a way to do what they want to do the most. They almost universally seem to love language, solving puzzles, getting better at something and winning the respect of their peers. I have always wondered why the better Scrabble players (living room players, all) in my family are better than the rest of us, what skills they have that allow them to win so consistently. This book makes some of those reasons clear to me. The author's observation that math skills figure into the mix let me know right away why I'm not a better player than I am (among other reasons). I found this book hard to put down. The author seemed to be able to let us into the inner circle of the Scrabble world and describe some of the key personalities that inhabit it but did not write in a mean or disparaging way. Even though becoming even a "good" player seemed like more effort than I want to make, I will never look at Scrabble the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful book about charming idiosyncratics
Review: Breezy, fun book about charming (and sometimes alarming) misfits, dysfunctionals, and idiosyncratics. I agree with others who have noted that Fatsis devotes a tad too much narrative to the minutiae of SCRABBLE play, but this doesn't diminish the book's overall likeability. Fatsis also does an amazing job of portraying the "human side" of the Deep Geeks (as he once refers to them) and the other obsessed goofballs in the SCRABBLE subculture with love, understanding, respect, and sympathy. God knows that they may be weirder (by several orders of magnitude) than you (or, I hope, me), but they are definitely genuinely insteresting people, and I'm glad Katsis wrote this book about them and his adventures in the SCRABBLE realm.
Rating:
Summary: Wanna Scrabble?
Review: Amazing. If you love Scrabble, buy it. If you like Scrabble, buy it. If you've heard of Scrabble, buy it. Who knew dysfunctional subcultures centered around board games could be so cool?
Rating:
Summary: Great fun and an enjoyable way to improve one's game
Review: Not only was this book extremely well written and as much of a page turner as a great work of fiction, I improved my game of Scrabble by just reading it. I am a somewhat serious hobbyist player who never went beyound memorizing all the two letter words and Q words without U's. The strategy sedtions were fascinating and I now find myself using methods depicted in the book as well as all the new wacky words that I never even knew existed. Even more, I now want to study anagrams and word lists.
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