I loved the jigsaw chapter in your book. It was also interesting reading about riddles. When you think of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, people are very attracted to them, but I’m not sure if they are as much part of our culture anymore. A word tower or word pyramid is a simple anagram variant puzzle where you must solve crossword clues alongside each row of a tower. On each subsequent row of the tower, the word is an anagram of the word on the row above it with an extra letter added. For instance, if the clue for the first clue is 'Consume food' with answer 'EAT', then you will know that the next answer is an anagram of 'EAT' plus one new letter. Therefore if the clue is 'Dislike intensely' then 'HATE's is a valid answer since it's an anagram of EAT+H. The classic logic puzzle that uses numbers! In sudoku, the rules are compellingly simple although solving the puzzle may not be. Here you must place the numbers 1-9 once in each row, column and 3x3 box. With this puzzle not only are you required to solve a crossword, but you are also required to work out the crossword grid itself too! At the start of the puzzle you will be given a few scraps of information: a few numbers in the grid corresponding to certain across and down clues, and a few squares too - but the rest is up to you. Armed with the clues alone you will need to work out the grid pattern and the solution to the puzzle. I put that in there because it is the ultimate puzzle. How do we figure out why we’re here? I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I didn’t 100% figure out the meaning of life. I think part of the meaning of life is actually the search for the meaning of life. That may sound glib, but I truly believe it. Curiosity and looking for the meaning—even if we never find it—is the meaning. That actually relates to one of the books that I recommended, Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is all about recursion and paradox. I love that stuff. So yes, to me, part of the meaning of life is trying to solve the puzzle of the meaning of life.

Yes. I cast a very wide net of types of puzzles. My first love is crosswords and word puzzles. But there are also logic puzzles, Sudoku, and puzzle types I never even knew about but that are huge, like Japanese puzzle boxes. I was able to find these subcultures where people are obsessed with them, where it’s like a religion. They are as devoted to it as religious people are to their various denominations. What I loved was meeting people like Elonka, or the guy who solves the Rubik’s cube with his feet in less than 20 seconds. There are just so many characters who are delightfully weird and eccentric. It was so fun to explore not only the history of puzzles, but who these people are and why they love puzzles so much. That’s right. It cast a certain shadow at noon on the equinox and if you dug there, you would find it. There was a scandal because the person who won might have cheated, they knew the author’s ex-girlfriend or something like that. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous book. I loved the idea of putting hints in a book that lead to a real treasure. The book spawned an entire genre of books called armchair treasure hunts, where people would hide things. There’s an American version called The Secret where the author buried 12 treasures around North America. As I said, I’m a huge fan of paradoxes and recursion. As part of my book, I helped create the most time-consuming puzzle ever made. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It’s got 55 wooden pegs which you have to turn in a certain way. To finish it, you have to turn the pegs 1.3 decillion times, which is an unimaginably huge number. If you turn one peg per second, the universe will run out of energy by the time you solve it.

Which Christmas film do you love the most? Which Christmas film do you hate the most? What even counts as a Christmas film? Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. There are many articles that outline the strategies that you can use to solve sudoku puzzles: the two most common rules are to consider the options that can be placed in an individual square (which numbers from 1-9 can go in this square?) and the second most common rule is 'where can a number go in this row/column/box region?). For instance, if there is only one square in a row that can contain a 3 then it must be placed there, since we know each row/column/box (called regions) must contain 1-9 exactly once each. Let’s go on to Masquerade by Kit Williams, which is an armchair treasure hunt. This was a big deal, I think.

As someone who never managed to do more than one side of the Rubik’s Cube, I was quite impressed reading that chapter. They don’t call it a treasure hunt. They call it a ‘puzzle hunt.’ But it is very similar. Going to the MIT Mystery Hunt was one of the adventures in my book. It’s where I met the people who wrote the puzzles for my contest. It’s a crazy annual event. It’s like an ironman triathlon for nerds. It’s 2,000 of the smartest people you can imagine, who come to Boston to the campus of MIT and spend 72 hours solving about 150 of the hardest, most baffling puzzles you can imagine. It’s a team competition and the team that finds the penny on the MIT campus wins. I also think that puzzles are a Platonic ideal of a problem. Life’s problems are often very complicated. There is no one simple answer; there are a bunch of answers. Each is suboptimal and you have to figure out which is the best of the imperfect solutions. But with puzzles, there is that one perfect solution. It is very satisfying. We live in a world of greys and probabilities and puzzles present us with that Platonic ideal where you can say, ‘Okay, it all makes sense. It all works perfectly. It all fits together.’ So that is another reason. Even without the puzzles, I like the book for the writing alone. I love this line: “My preferred learning style has always been to jump off the cliff first and build a parachute on the way down.” I don’t agree with it. I think it’s a terrible life philosophy. But I love it. It’s so wittily expressed. M is a clever and funny writer. Word wheels are a great way to test your vocabulary and whilst a simple puzzle, they are enduringly popular. The set-up of this puzzle type is quite simple: you are given a wheel that contains eight letters around the inside, and one additional letter in the middle of the wheel. You must then find as many words as you can (no proper nouns or plural) from the letters in the grid. Every word you find must use a selection of letters from the outside of the wheel and in addition every word must use the central letter. There is also always one word that uses every letter in the grid - can you find it? If you're good at solving the Countdown conundrum then you will probably be good at finding the nine-letter word in a wordwheel puzzle!

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So words are my true love. But I grew to love all these other genres, including jigsaws, which I was very snobby about and looked down on. I was, ‘They’re not real puzzles.’ But I am a reformed jigsaw skeptic. I can officially say I am now a jigsaw lover. There are many popular puzzle types, including crosswords, wordsearches, arrow words, codewords, sudoku and kriss kross. No, I came across it because (like you) I was always asking people what their favorite book puzzle books were. This book was a recurring theme. A lot of people love The Master Theorem. It’s colorful and artistic.

There are currently four books to test your PI skills, with over 100 puzzles in each: Code Breakers, Math & Logic Games, Visual Puzzles, and Lateral Brain Teasers. I read this book in college and I understood about 40% of it. I just looked at it again and maybe got up to 50% or 60%. It’s a dense book but it’s very playful. It’s hard to describe. It’s part history, part puzzles, and a lot of philosophy. His goal is to try to explain how a bunch of lifeless atoms can create consciousness. He uses all sorts of interesting metaphors. The atoms are like a colony of ants. The atoms in our brain are like meaningless letters, but you put them together and they gain meaning. There’s the idea that when you boil it down, some things are just axiomatic and don’t make sense except within the system. Part of the book is dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise. So it’s a very strange book but it’s full of delightful little nuggets. Book of Skeleton Crosswords Volumes 1-6 "Skeleton crosswords can keep me absorbed for hours, I used to like cryptic crosswords but these are better. ★★★★★ Yes, exactly. I discovered this because one of my favorite characters that I interviewed for my book is a woman named Elonka Dunin. She is obsessed with secret codes and ciphers and cryptics. So obsessed, in fact, that she moved states to be closer to one of her favorite puzzles. It’s called Kryptos and it’s at the headquarters of the CIA. It’s a sculpture that was created 32 years ago that is a cipher. It’s a big metal wall, carved with hundreds of letters. No one, not even the CIA, has been able to solve the cipher completely. They’ve solved parts of it, but no one has completely figured it all out. It’s one of the most famously unsolved puzzles in the world. There are various tactics that can help you to do this - for a start certain letters are much more popular in English than others, so the number that occurs the most time is usually the E, or possibly the T or A which are other common letters. There are also various other patterns common in English that can help you solve: for instance if you have the letter 'I' two from the end of a word, then it is often the case that the word ends in 'ING' or 'ION'.

There are 50 skeleton crosswords in this brand new book with all new puzzles, and the grid pattern for each of the puzzles is different so you'll be provided with a unique crossword and a unique challenge to work out the grid shape for every one of these puzzles. We hope you enjoy the challenge that is posed by these skeleton puzzles - if you can complete them all, then you truly are a crossword master. The puzzles use British English, so for our American friends please note occasionally words may have a different spelling to you are used to: eg 'colour' as opposed to 'color' and so forth. They’re very literary. So Tolkien, Harry Potter. Jane Austen had a lot of riddles. They are perhaps the oldest type of puzzle, and they are incredibly cross-cultural. Any culture from any time period has riddles. I do think they do get a bit of a bad rap, especially compared to their cousin, the joke. Jokes are considered much cooler than riddles. Even if you look at Batman, Heath Ledger won the Oscar for playing the Joker, but the Riddler is not as exciting a character. Let’s go on to your next book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. This won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Can you explain what it’s about and how it relates to puzzles?