Does one ever really finish reading this book? I have a number of pages I want to go back and photocopy so I can work the puzzles. As in addition to being about a score of different kinds of puzzles, their history, their famous (well) solvers and creator, and why we like puzzles, this book also includes puzzles. Of course.
Not just jigsaw puzzles which are probably your first thought but everything from crosswords to Kenken to chess puzzles (which are not chess games.) Learn about when newspapers said that our love of rebuses and crosswords would be the end of civilized society! And how the New York Times was super snobby about crossword puzzles when they were first invented and wouldn't run them as they were considered kind of dumb and trashy. Learn the history of the Rubick's cube and how the super-fast solvers work. Go with AJ to an international jigsaw championship in which he and his family represent the United States. And ponder over all the various puzzles big and small throughout. I haven't even figured out WHERE the first puzzle is (somewhere in the introduction there's a puzzle) let alone attempted to solve it.
This book was fun and had the right level of entertainment and weird facts, combined with reinforcing how puzzles are calming (you get into a state of FLOW when doing a jigsaw which I can attest to), make you smarter, and for me in particular, satisfy a need to make order out of chaos, which I really need right now as there's a lot of chaos going on around me at the moment. If you have any avid puzzlers in your life, this is a fabulous book for them.
I bought this book at Main Street Books, an independent bookstore in Davidson, North Carolina.
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