The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This morning, I watched Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia do the book publicity song-and-dance on Tim Russert's show. He took questions about his judicial philosophy, and tried hard to behave himself. It felt strange. As a kid, all I knew of the Court was what I saw in snippets on the nightly news: confirmation hearings, swearings-in, and stock footage of Anita Hill. Never any selling or cajoling, which is the point of any Sunday morning talk show appearance.

This "better know a justice" phenomenon seems to be a direct byproduct of both the Rehnquist era and the hard work of Supreme Court groupies--er, journalists--like Jeffrey Toobin. His book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court has all the personality tidbits you could ever want, while laying out many of the significant decisions and issues of the past 25 years. And for someone who's paid attention mostly to anecdotal Court stuff over the years, it's a great narrative of the Rehnquist regime.

The book does have its flaws. Like the adherence to the same handful of issues we hear about over and over in the coverage of the Court. In fact, about fifty pages in, I was afraid the whole book would be about abortion cases (it wasn't, thankfully). Toobin does much better when he gets off the Roe v. Wade path, and talks about the justices' personalities.

Also, Toobin doesn't do much to disguise his own loyalties to the justices. He totally hearts Sandy Day O'Connor. Either she gave the most extensive interviews, or his mother was a WASP-y blonde dynamo. And his dislikes are equally obvious. Calling Justice Thomas "the nation's most famous beneficiary of affirmative action" who opposes the policy for everyone else probably won't get Toobin a seat at the next Thomas dinner party.

All the same, each justice gets his or her share of quirk. Ginsburg and Scalia spend New Year's together, despite bitter philosophical fights. Thomas kept photos on his desk of his clerk's lesbian partner. Breyer can't conduct conversations at a normal decibel. O'Connor made her clerks exercise with her. Rehnquist wrote a song about the Miranda case. Stevens defies all odds by sticking around and holding out for a Democratic president. Kennedy is a Republican who cares what the international community thinks. And Souter is a woodsman who pretends to be Justice Breyer at Massachusetts rest stops.** Souter actually gets some of the funniest moments in the book. Like when O'Connor, the "Yenta of Paradise Valley," tries to fix up the hermit bachelor on awkward dates.

I also enjoyed the insight into Clinton's justice-selection process (we came dangerously close to having to listen to Alfonse D'Amato trying to out-New York Scalia), and the shout-outs to some of my favorite recent cases. Kelo v. New London got a page or two, and even Bong Hits 4 Jesus scored a mention (I believe this is one of Scott's favorites as well, at least until the Court has to rule on the constitutionality of fogcutters).

There's also some heartache mixed in. Turns out I still can't read about Bush v. Gore without a physical tug of revulsion. Knowing that O'Connor came to despise Bush isn't much comfort after her very partisan swing vote put him into office. And I'm more terrified than ever that Stevens will drop dead before November, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

But fears and political ulcers aside, the book is fast-paced and witty. I'm pretty sure there aren't many jurisprudential books that would be compelling enough to make me drag them on the subway.

Some of the favorite parts:

"Meanwhile, Scalia wrote his own dissent, which surpassed even his own high standards for invective and hysteria."

"There, surrounded by many of the most powerful people in the country, Thomas paid tribute to himself for having the courage to agree with them."

"One of his fellow justices once prevailed Souter to take a woman out to dinner, and she reported back that she thought the evening had gone very well--until the end. Souter took her home, told her what a good time he had, then added: 'Let's do this again next year.'"

"At an appearance at a New York synagogue in 2005, Scalia was asked to compare his own judicial philosophy with that of Thomas. 'I am an originalist,' Scalia said, 'but I am not a nut.'"

"At his home in the Naval Observatory, Gore passed the news to his family and watched the coverage on television. At 3:11 p.m., he sent a BlackBerry message to his chief spokesmen, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane: 'Please make sure that no one trashes the Supreme Court.'"




**This episode is under dispute by my independent Supreme Court expert. "What's the subset of Massachusetts rest-stop patrons who a) recognize the face of a sitting Justice, b) do not recall the name of said Justice, and c) recall the name of a different, semi-obscure Justice?"

Jhumpa Lahiri at the Strand

Did I say that the Strand was dead to me? I...lied. Sort of. We're still on a break, but I can go when there's a cool event, right? Like a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, who's been a favorite writer since aught-three.

Having discovered recently that we have the exact same taste in books, Sheryl and I took our book buddy-ness to Union Square after work for the reading. We were way early (it's always so hard to tell when the suffocating literary mob will show up for these things), and after snagging some good seats, we amused ourselves in the children's/YA book sections. Between the old-school books and the fun conversation, good times.

Lahiri's on tour for her new book, Unaccustomed Earth. The reading itself was very professional, if a bit joyless. She read a story that I haven't gotten to yet in the book, but remembered vaguely from The New Yorker a few years ago. Lahiri's public demeanor is interesting. She's not a smiler, and it was hard to tell if she's done this so much that it's boring, or if she's got that jaded Boston-New York thing going on. Anyway, she didn't play up to the crowd, but it worked well with her low-key writing style. And she did thank her editor, which was cute. More people need to thank their editors, and stop squeezing them for money or complaining about deadlines.

Also, she was a good sport about the usual bad Q&A (paraphrased for maximum brutality):

"Clearly, every single one of your Indian-American characters is completely autobiographical. How did you manage to write a character that has a penis? You don't have one."

"Doesn't immigration make you sad?"

"Here's a bad review of your new book that I just read...."

*sigh* People ask the lame questions because they can't ask the ones they really want to know, about the author's personal life. Like, "Do you live closer to Kate or to Sheryl in Brooklyn?"

Anyway, it was a fun night, and I'm looking forward to the next one: David Sedaris!

bookstore breakup

Because I'm still in the midst of a reading binge, I've got a different kind of review for now: bookstore. More specifically, the Strand--home to "18 miles of books," except of course the books you want. The Strand is officially on notice!

It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:

1. They never have the books I want. Atonement...Last Exit to Brooklyn...The Sportswriter...and several others. It's dicey to go into a used bookstore with specific titles in mind, but those were hardly rare ones. And in each case, they had every other Ian McEwan book, every other Richard Ford book, etc. They didn't even have Gossip Girl (sorry, Sheryl!), which is not only old at this point, but there are a million copies floating around that people don't want to keep on their bookshelves. Also, neither the main Union Square branch nor the Fulton Street branch had any of the books. This is less the fault of the store than the sellers, but still: disappointing. Their retail books are just as hard to find.

2. They hate short people. When they do have a book I want, it's invariably located on the shelf eight feet above my head. Sometimes, like today, that means going to find a tall, friendly clerk to fetch the book for me. And while I'm usually all for having attractive guys do my manual labor, it's an inconvenience.

3. Manhattan-style space management. For a store that tries so hard to be browser friendly (tables with eclectic picks, lots of cool old books in odd corners), there's no room. The aisles are about two feet wide, which means it's impossible to get around the senior citizen professor browsing the philosophy display, or the hipster girl holding What is the What.

Anyway, it makes me miss my beloved Harvard Book Store something fierce. And it also makes me envious of those who get to visit Powell's in the near future. So in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts...and the Strand is dead to me for a little while.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep by DT Max

Sleep and I don't have the best relationship. I know we should spend more time together--in fact, we should be hanging out right now. Sometimes it's just so hard to make the schedules work. However, despite our problems, I don't know what I'd do without sleep.

That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular family is an Italian clan, dating back a single ancestor in the 1700s, whose members have a tendency to develop Fatal Familial Insomnia in middle age. FFI victims have a sudden onset of symptoms: since their brains can't rest, the body deteriorates as well. Organs begin to shut down. The person sweats and hallucinates uncontrollably. Even the ultimate coma is a nightmare of thrashing and agony. Finally, maybe months later, the person dies of total exhaustion. Five years later, his sister develops the signs. Twenty years later, it's his niece and one of his sons. It's the family plague.

While tracing the history of the family from that eighteenth-century Venetian doctor through a Mussolini-era local politician to the present day, science journalist D.T. Max takes a harder look at the science behind the disease. It turns out that FFI isn't caused by run-of-the-mill genetic defects, or an unlucky susceptibility to viruses. It's caused by "prions," or infectious particles derived from protein and almost impossible to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do about prion diseases. Since the 1950s, doctors and scientists have known that prions exist, and that they cause devastating (and almost always fatal) diseases like FFI and the similar Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (one strain of which is mad cow). But there's virtually no treatment available, and definitely no cure. Accurate diagnoses are rare as well; the Italian family had to fight against doctors who assumed nervous exhaustion and/or alcoholism were to blame for the strange tremors and rapid degeneration. Modern British and American people who have CJD aren't having much more luck--especially older ones, whose symptoms are generally assumed to be Alzheimer's.

The sections talking about the mad cow epizootic/epidemic are the most terrifying parts of the book. The fact that the disease is on an invisible timer ("Happy 45th birthday! Remember those burgers you ate all those years ago?"), and doctors can't predict which people will develop symptoms, is bad enough. But then add that countries like England, Canada, and the U.S. know that this disease is generally transmitted by feeding infected cow proteins to other cows, which are then fed to humans--yet they still can't get up the regulatory wherewithal to pull all the infected cows out of the beef population and ensure that farmers are using the proper precautions. Basically, we're all screwed.

(In completely related news, I don't think my birthday dinner will include the usual steak this year.)

if the subject matter is depressing, at least the storytelling is very good. The most disheartening part of the book (after you're done calculating all the beef you've eaten in your lifetime, and figuring out how much quality sleep you really got last night) may be that there's no real resolution. If the book has a drawback, that's it. A "happy" ending isn't feasible, but there's no ending at all. Just the politics of science, with slow drabbles of genuine scientific advance.

Now: who's up for some veggie burgers, followed by a long, luxuriant nap?

Wakefield Redux

"That's the stupidest story I ever heard, and I've read the entire Sweet Valley High series." -- Moe Szyslak

Sweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative of the girl genre in the 80s. It's a time capsule--why not leave the original books as such? Don't fear the past, Random House. What's next: Laura Ingalls Wilder getting a hip job as a prairie au pair and texting her friends about it?

At the same time, I'm super jealous that I don't get to be the editor on the relaunch. That's the job I was born to do, dammit! I read dutifully until #100 or so, when it was time to stop and relinquish the brand to the next group of tweeners. As a kid, I studied all the new SVH covers in B. Dalton books, and had most of them read while my parents did other stuff around the mall. I walked out of the library with stacks of the older, 1983-tastic books. I had the board game (I was always Elizabeth). If pressed, I could probably still talk fluently about plotlines and characters.

I hope they don't change the deeply literary prose: Jessica stared at herself in the full-length mirror and saw a picture of utter heartbreak and despair. But what was actually reflected in the glass was about the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl imaginable.

The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs

Once you've mastered all the knowledge in the world (or at least all the knowledge in the encyclopedia), where do you go from there? Well, if you're AJ Jacobs, Esquire writer and all-around infopreneur, you go for the biggest book of all: the Bible. Jacobs decided to follow up his encyclopedic memoir The Know-It-All with an even more intense test of the academic spirit and his wife's patience: he would live for a year, following every possible rule in the Bible.

Now, that's a lot of rules. And many of them involve things like stoning your fellow citizens--which is, surprisingly enough, not so cool in modern-day New York. But Jacobs makes a pretty good go of it in his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. As an agnostic, his main connection to Judaism is through purely social stuff and slightly wacky relatives. Curious, he wonders what a person misses by avoiding religion, and whether he's depriving his toddler son of a moral and emotional imperative. Hence the quest. But a writerly review of the Bible would be too easy--so Jacobs has to plunge himself, fully committed, into following every rule, every commandment, every suggestion in every book of The Book. (Well, minus the stoning ones.)

A lot of his journey is personal. He talks about growing out his beard (which Leviticus says can't be groomed) for an entire year. He tries to pray, wondering if his newfound piety will make him feel genuinely spiritual. He struggles with the Biblicality of his wife's fertility treatments (is it unnatural, or is it being fruitful and multiplying?). He risks his wife's constant exasperation with the rule that prohibits him from touching a woman while she's "impure" every month, and from sitting on any surface that might have been touched by an impure woman (good luck with that one on public transportation). He faces family drama by connecting up with his zany former uncle Gil, a wannabe cult leader in Israel. He alienates friends with limited conversations (sarcasm is a no-no, brutal honesty is a must) and many, many dietary restrictions. And it's all done in a funny, frank manner that makes you groan and sympathize with everyone who had to put up with him for a year.

The parts that aren't so intimate, which make it a real book and not just a long humor essay in Esquire, are Jacobs's interactions with real spiritual advisors and actively religious people to provide background. So many tidbits were interesting....Like the Orthodox Jewish man who freelances as a clothing-fiber consultant to make sure that one's clothes don't mix wool and linen. Or the aforementioned Uncle Gil, whose Jerusalem dinner parties are a combination of a 1970s Woody Allen movie and Waco.

One of my favorite informational bits was about the Red Heifer, the animal that must be sacrificed, cremated, mixed with water, and sprinkled on one's head for true purification. But the red heifer must be completely unblemished (not a single non-red hair), and have never plowed a field. No problem--except no such cow exists. Apparently there's an international breeding initiative supported by super-fundamentalist Christians and super-Orthodox Jews, because without the cow and its total purification, no one can build the Third Temple. No temple, no Jewish Messiah and battler of the Antichrist. So basically, everyone wants the cow. It's a fascinating project, and one I'd never heard of before. But while it's easy to categorize it as those loopy zealots doing their thing, there are political implications as well. "It's not just that it's zany...it's that it's potentially dangerous. If the red heifer arrives, it'll be seen by some as divine permission to build a Third Temple. Where would it go? On the Temple Mount, which is currently under the administration of Muslims--home to their sacred Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Then it really might be the end of the world." Yikes. Shades of Jesus Camp, which is, to date, the scariest movie I've ever seen.

All around, it's a very entertaining and informative book. Jacobs is really engaging, and isn't shy about making himself look like an idiot to get to some deeper knowledge. I am, however, glad I'm not his (obviously very patient) wife. Remember, kids: never marry a creative nonfictionist. And the next time you see a Moses-y looking guy on public transportation or walking down the street, and you think, "Uh oh, religious nut," be kind. He could have a book deal.

Some of my favorite passages:

"Is half the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love?"

"Speaking of dinosaurs, if they were really on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

'He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.'"

"[Gil] talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. 'You know what I said every day? "God, get them out of here!" What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do.'

When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader--and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

'I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand.'

Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

'You just did the sign for toast,' says the girl. Gil shrugs.

'Well, it wasn't the most important thing that I invented in my life.'"

Jon Stewart's book club

At tonight's taping of The Daily Show, I was thinking about what a boon Jon Stewart has been for the publishing industry. In between the Doris Kearns Goodwins and the Tom Brokaws who turn up to push their books, there are more obscure authors whose books on the Teapot Dome scandal or Mary Todd Lincoln would never get any play anywhere but C-Span2 on weekends.

I wondered whether these books see a sales bump, the way almost all of the authors booked on Oprah do. Of course, Jon Stewart is no Oprah (proven by the fact that there were no car keys under my seat this evening). But The Daily Show is hitting an awfully desirable demographic: educated liberals, otherwise known as People Who Buy Books.

As I checked the Bookscan sales for the books who have been on the show lately, I realized there was a problem: if the author appears on The Daily Show the same week the book comes out, how can you tell whether the sales are due to this publicity and not whatever else the publisher is doing? Well, you can't. So "new" books were out.

BUT. There are cases where the author appeared on the show months after a book's release for whatever reason (political timeliness, late pushes from the book publicist, etc.). Like Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger. Book was released in April. Dallek was on the show in late July. Sales increased 133% the week after the show, and another 28% the week after that. Last week, Ronald Kessler came by to talk about torture--with his November book, The Terrorist Watch, on full display. Sales have gone up 100% this week.

Our previously mentioned friend, Doris K-G, was on the show in late January to talk about the state of State of the Unions. No mention of her last book, and no copy sitting on the desk. No spike in sales. So it's clearly the specific mentions that are driving this. I'm willing to bet (and offer 9-1 odds!) that Colbert's author guests see similar results.

It's not that I'm surprised that television publicity leads to sales. And there's so little proof of what does cause people to go out and buy books, outside of assumption and possibly coincidental timing. But what I do find amazing is that The Daily Show and its progeny have amassed this kind of power. Who saw that coming, back in the Craig Kilborn days--or even the early Stewart days? If someone had said, in 1996, that Comedy Central would become the go-to place for authors, he'd have been burned at the stake (they did that back then, right?).

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

If Freud was right, and all women really do have penis envy, I'm pretty sure I've been cured of that by modern American literature. Between the Rabbit Angstroms and the Nathan Zuckermans and now the Frank Bascombes, I am eternally thankful that I will never be a middle-aged man.

Based on recommendations from friends, Jacob and I picked Richard Ford's The Sportswriter as our latest book club selection. Ford's hero is Frank Bascombe, a quasi-sportswriter whose home field is suburban New Jersey. Since no one in his right mind chooses to live in suburban New Jersey, that should tell you right away that dude's got issues. But I digress.... Frank's main problems are these: his life has completely fallen apart after the death of his son two years ago; his wife stopped enabling his neverending string of midlife crises (teaching in New England! Relationships with other women! A motorcycle!) and left him, taking their two surviving kids to a different neighborhood; and he doesn't know how to manage his relationships with women. Or with men, for that matter. Frank can't really connect to anybody anymore. A lot of this is his own fault; he tries so hard to see everything from every perspective that he fails to commit to anything, whether it's spending time with his kids, or his new girlfriend, ditzy nurse Vicki. He sees what he could do, he sees what could happen accordingly, and then he reacts by panicking and doing or saying the worst possible thing. That's how he ends up in a quarrel with pretty much everyone he meets on Easter weekend in 1983. Without going back through the book, I'm pretty sure he gets punched more than once.

But Frank does try to have a smooth suburban life. He keeps the house he bought with his wife when they were first married, and he was a newly published author. He takes in a seminary student border. He joins a Divorced Men's Club, a gruesome exercise in male bonding that involves phony fishing trips and torturous conversations over beer. He sees himself as the genial Other figure in everyone's life, so he doesn't have to figure out how to be the central figure in his own--and he sees the homogenous greenness of New Jersey as the way to accomplish that. Same deal with his career. Even though he seems to have little interest in actual sports, he loves the process of ferreting out the feel-good stories, and bringing tidy ideas of literature to the masses of men who read his magazine. In short, he wants to be That Guy Down the Street, the one who can bullshit with you about the Knicks over a beer or two, but doesn't go any deeper than that. He wants to be simple and uncomplex, but he lives so fully within his own head that everything is totally self-conscious.

His relationships with the women in his life are more problematic. He wants his ex (whom he actually calls X) to be more accessible to him, but sort of accepts that she gets to move on without him. He wants his girlfriend, a deceptively sweet belle from Texas, to be the uncomplicated lover--sometimes he thinks they should get married and then can't stand to be in the same room with her, usually in the same minute. And when X and Vicki start looking less likely, he thinks he wants another crack at his previous lovers, even though those relationships ended just as awkwardly. Jacob astutely pointed out that Frank thinks the women are there just for him: appearing in hotel bars, or naked on the bed exactly when he wants them to be. Objectively, he knows that they've got lives too, but he can't really see them branching out after he's been around. By the end of the book, Frank has become unglued because he can't find the female tethers anymore--he's basically adrift in a sea of Boy Issues: post-divorce loneliness, sexual confusion, life situations that can't be fixed with sports metaphors or a quick one-night stand.

Honestly, the whole book left me unsettled--it was one of those books that got darker the more I thought about it. The writing was good, but my desire to shake Frank eventually eclipsed that. It didn't do much for my fear that all guys cheat when they see a more attractive opportunity (which is more my fault than Frank's, but still), or my hope that maybe living in your head isn't so bad. If nothing else, it's a good argument for going out there and making emotional connections, before you find yourself 38 and unable to do it. Oh, and for not moving to New Jersey. That's probably always a bad idea.

Personals Ad by Allen Ginsberg

One of my goals for 2008 is to read more poetry. So far, I'm not doing so well....I've got a new volume of rock 'n roll-themed poetry--foreword by Bono!--sitting on my shelf, and it's not exactly burning its way to the top of my queue. But I was watching the awesome Ovation channel the other day, and caught a half-hour profile of Allen Ginsberg. Talking about his final years, it featured a poem I'd never seen before, but which charmed me thoroughly:

Personals Ad (1990)

Poet professor in autumn years
seeks helpmate companion protector friend
young lover w/empty compassionate soul
exuberant spirit, straightforward handsome
athletic physique & boundless mind, courageous
warrior who may also like women&girls, no problem,
to share bed meditation apartment Lower East Side,
help inspire mankind conquer world anger & guilt,
empowered by Whitman Blake Rimbaud Ma Rainey & Vivaldi,
familiar respecting Art's primordial majesty, priapic carefree
playful harmless slave or master, mortally tender passing swift time,
photographer, musician, painter, poet, yuppie or scholar
Find me here in New York alone with the Alone
going to lady psychiatrist who says Make time in your life
for someone you can call darling, honey, who holds you dear
can get excited & lay his head on your heart in peace.

The whole thing, like most of Ginsberg's poetry, sounds even better when you read it aloud. And the moral of the story is this: don't discount those weird little ads in the back of the New York Review of Books. Lovah memoirs still score big advances. Or it could just be Philip Roth, looking for a last sexually dysfunctional relationship to feature in his next book. Either way, it may be worth the risk.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

Back in the old days of aught-six, I read a book which (I presumed) represented some of the most extreme wordplay junkies: Crossworld. Now, thanks to Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, the crossword enthusiasts look like like slacker hobbyists.

In Stefan Fatsis's memoir/immersion research piece, he examines the small, ridiculously competitive world of tournament Scrabble. He begins with a Plimpton-esque goal of learning more about a game that's always interested him on a casual level. However, the narrative turns into his own obsession with joining the expert ranks, and fitting in with the cool kids. (Insofar as as adults who customize Scrabble boards and study words lists for fun can be "cool.") The early bits offer some background on the game and board games in general, which is pretty cool. Did you know that in 1953, Scrabble was so hot and rare that "buying a Scrabble set in New York is something akin to nabbing a prime rib roast at ceiling price during WWII"? That Candy Land sales reflect the birth rate of three years earlier? That Scrabble sells millions of units per year with virtually zero advertising? Or that Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit were developed by the same company, and so mismanaged that they almost died in their respective booms? Anyway, I found that interesting.

Scrabble is also notable for having the biggest, most rabid community of players of any proprietary game (e.g. not chess, backgammon, or other games which have been played for centuries). This, of course, leads to major political issues: who has the best interests of the game at heart? Is it the people who own the copyright and make the money, or is it the people who devote large chunks of their lives to the play and study of the game? There's a middle group, the National Scrabble Association (NSA), but they pretty much piss everyone off by being the unfortunate middle man. Some of the funniest parts of the book are the descriptions of the interactions of players with the NSA. Let's just say it all involves death threats over word lists, mass protests over whether or not the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary can censor racial slurs, and a bizarre twelve-act play about how the head of the NSA slighted one player's "contributions to Scrabble."

Competitive (or at least serious) Scrabble players don't seem to be the happiest people around. One of the nation's top players, briefly a writer for SNL, is hooked on herbal uppers, and supplements his virtual unemployment with obsessive Scrabbling and occasional stand-up comedy gigs. Another, a gifted anagrammer, lives in Baltimore (avoiding jobs because working 9-5 doesn't "suit his personality") and takes 30-hour bus trips to various tournaments. Yet another has major gastrointestinal problems. Others have regular day jobs, but devote their free time and social lives to playing Scrabble in clubs or in Washington Square Park. They're a community, though, and have the light moments and the camaraderie along with the competition. There just doesn't seem to be much joie de vivre--or at least not the kind one might associate with playing a beloved game.

That becomes apparent in Fatsis's voice, too. When he's just a journalist, meeting people and taking notes for his nebulous piece on Scrabble, there's a joy to be learning different methods and words, and socializing with a new group. But he gets more and more invested in winning himself, and reaching the expert level of his new friends and recent teachers. His own score becomes the timeline, and bits of crankiness with the game and the people start to show.

They all seem to discount any happiness that might derive from any part of the game that's not winning, or improving obscure word skills so that one will win next time. Words don't need definitions; they just need to be among the 120,302 valid words in the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary. Where's the fun in a game if you have to keep stopping to explain why your use of UNCINATE or STOURIE is technically correct? Fatsis tries to establish that the senses of community and intellectual sharing are the heart--but the emphasis on words that will never, ever come up outside of a game board is a little off-putting.

While memorizing thousands of words without context is entirely unappealing, I did learn a lot about how to step up my game. I'd like to check out the group at Washington Square, to see if that's still around. And maybe slightly obsessive practice on Facebook, online, and in living rooms from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, are okay. Or it's all a gateway drug, and I'll be plugging away in some low-level tournament in New Jersey, trying to add a few paltry points to my rating. Whatever.