Balderdash is to words as Ex Libris is to book titles and plot summaries. While the Balderdash game works best for obscure vocabulary, Ex Libris is satisfyingly humorous over a range of well-known autobiographies, to unknown romance novels. This literary game begins with the player appointed as the reader picking a card and reading aloud the book title, the author, and a plot summary. They then instruct the other players, the writers, to each compose a convincing first or last sentence of the book. Finally, the cards are shuffled, the true sentence is mixed in, and the writers of that round must determine what they believe is the veritable card. Points are awarded for getting the correct answer and tricking others to pick your own sentence.

Ex Libris LIVE! at Blackwell's truly makes the game come alive. On Monday night the contestants were comic writer Helen Lederer, short story writer Orlando Ortega-Medina, crime novelist Thomas Mogford, and children's author Ross Welford. They stuck to the format of the game with the addition that the reader was interviewed by host David Freeman and had a chance to describe his or her path to becoming a writer and showcase their recent publications, all while the writers scrambled to pen fake but plausible beginning and ending sentences. Another extension of the board game version was that Freeman awarded points for creativity, which added an entertaining element to the game show, and reminded me of a Whose Line Is It Anyway? style of keeping score. Just as the points on this improvisation show do not really matter, the Ex Libris game is not really about the points; it is a convenient tactic to spark conversations about reading and writing.

Ex Libris forced this group of writers out of their familiar genres, and to comic effect. The audience witnessed Mogford, comfortable in the world of murder mystery thrillers, take a stab at the first lines of romance novels The Vasquez Baby and Taken by the T-Rex. Lederer, who I imagine is not an avid reader of spiritual texts such as Does God Ever Speak through Cats?, effectively stuck to comedy for this round. Her first sentence imagined the author, David Evans, tripping over a litter box and falling on his coccyx. In the same round, Welford impressed his fellow panelists and the audience by poetically listing several cat breeds, and managed to fool others into voting for his fabricated book opening. More familiar works such as Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald still managed to stump the bookish contestants, but kept the audience chuckling and oohing nonetheless.

Part of the enjoyment as a spectator was that you did not have the stress of crafting a sentence, but you could still play along. Moreover, I was entertained by Freeman's extemporaneous interviews with each of the panelists. I received an unexpected but welcome lesson in Gibraltarian history from Mogford, since this is where he sets his novels. Later, Freeman engaged Ortega-Medina in a discussion of how he gives poetic attention to every syllable in his short stories, and how this might be quite literally lost in translation if Jerusalem Ablaze: Stories of Love and Other Obsessions is published in other languages. Overall, Freeman served as an amicable host and engaged the invited guests just as well as the audience; we were all enjoying the evening.

The event achieved what it set out to do: by the end, I wanted to read the diverse recent works of these authors. While we normally research or meet an author after reading one of his or her books, it was interesting to turn this around; getting to know the faces behind the pages in advance may enlighten the content I hope to come across in the near future. However, my only critique is that I would have liked another dimension of audience engagement, perhaps by taking an audience vote for the true sentence, or by sneaking in a few cards from brave non-panelists. Either way, I left wanting to buy my own set of Ex Libris to play with scholastic and quick-witted friends.

You can listen to previous shows, including Ex Libris After Dark, the abbreviated version of the game show. The next event in the Ex Libris LIVE! series will be 30th May at Blackwell's and will feature what I imagine to be an equally-amusing cast, with a professor of American Literature, a psychological thriller author, and two screenwriters. I plan to attend again, as the next batch of contestants will make for a dynamic distinct from this past show and lead to new literary discussions.