Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players

Word Freak is a superb book on the game of Scrabble — its origins, the changes to the game's rules over time, and especially the socially-challenged eccentrics who today comprise the small group of top-tier competitive players. Stefan Fatsis's book is supremely entertaining, but it also considers deeper themes — the nature of intelligence and memory (ground that Joshua Foer would cover later in Moonwalking with Einstein), mathematics (one of the secrets of Scrabble is that it is more of a math game than a verbal game), and competitive drive (the best players in the world definitely don't do it for the money).