Before reading this, I often wondered to myself: 'Hey, I'm half decent at Scrabble. However, as I mentioned above, the experience of reading the book is somewhat redeemed by the valuable lesson it contains. This distaste lingers throughout the book and ultimately detracts from its enjoyability- it's hard to like a book whose author and main character is a consummate dill-hole. This sour-grapes treatment reeks of intellectual bullying to me, and it makes it pretty hard to care about the author's experiences or sympathize with him whenever he receives a humbling defeat. One the one hand, Fatsis seems to have no compunction about boasting about his superior Scrabble skills in comparison to other Scrabble-playing hoi polloi on the other hand, when he becomes immersed in the world of seriously competitive Scrabble and finds that his skills and knowledge are woefully beneath the level of the pros, he wastes no time in tarring the pros as a bunch of maladjusted wacko nerds.

I should qualify my rating here by saying that I did not in fact like this book, as the literal interpretation of Goodreads' three-star rating would indicate- I thought it was more of a two-star book ('it was OK')- but I'm giving it a bonus star, because it contains a most valuable lesson that I don't know whether I could have learned so quickly and easily, had I not read this book.Īs for the book itself: it's pretty hard to like, because the voice of the author, which also doubles as the persona of the 'main character' in the ongoing story underlying the research and reporting, paints the author as a jerk.

Word freak by stefan fatsis