[books] BOB HARRIS - Prisoner of Trebekistan

I assumed this would be a cash-in on the heels of Word Freak and that movie about crosswords and the one about spelling bees and you get the idea... It is very much of a piece with those stylistically; Harris alternates between bits of personal memoir and detailed recountings of Jeopardy games. (VERY detailed-- in some cases based on frame-by-frame study of his videotapes.) But it's also sweet, funny, and, unusually, well-written. Harris, formerly a stand-up comic, cracks jokes constantly but does it with such a straight face that it quickly comes to feel like he's just reporting the contents of his head, at which point it's charming.

His little narrative hops into the future knit it all together, making it satisfying in the way that reading your own journal from a period you've forgotten is. They also make Prisoner Of Trebekistan slide in right next to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home on my mental shelf, a pretty good place for a book to be. Non-linearity is a somewhat adventurous technique for a writer, and I appreciate it just for that, but it's also the real texture of memory for me. Harris hops from one notional place to another along lines you'd choose yourself and along lines you wouldn't, reinforcing a Jeopardy-backed moral: The world is a web of facts, and even the things "everybody knows" change their meaning depending on what order you learn them in.

And here's the thing: I finished Word Freak wanting to play more Scrabble; I finished Prisoner wanting to live a bolder, more charitable, more spirited life. Harris' life lessons don't feel like a stretch, they feel like his motivation for writing the book in the first place.

I mean, you should take my praise with a grain of salt because I'm in a pretty sunny mood right now. But I think that the book put me there.