FoxMind Games: by The Book, a Novel Stacking Puzzle, brainteaser Logic with 40 Challenges, Ages 8 and up.

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Let’s move on to the last of the puzzle books you’ve recommended which is Codebreaking: A Practical Guide by Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh . This is not about using a computer but traditional codebreaking using paper and pencil, is that right? CAST OF CHARACTERS: Featuring a wide cast of Jane Austen's contemporaries and characters, take a tour of Austen's world from the rolling hills of Derbyshire, via Hampshire and Lyme Regis, to the golden stone of the Bath skyline as your build this puzzle. That’s a great introduction. Who doesn’t want to go and do hundreds of puzzles after hearing that? Which brings us nicely to the puzzle books you’re recommending. How did you set about choosing them? As well as being a puzzler yourself, you’ve now spent quite a bit of time with other people who spend a lot of time doing puzzles. Generally, based on yourself and your observation of others, what do you think attracts people to puzzles?

Edward Gorey (American, 1925–2000) Untitled The gleefully chaotic work reproduced in this puzzle might be seen as Edward Gorey’s celebration of the theater, which brought him great pleasure and inspiration. The acclaimed author-artist had a lifelong interest in the theater. His participation in the Broadway production of Draculagarnered three Tony Award nominations, and he wrote and produced engaging and quirky plays that appeared both on and off Broadway and on Cape Cod. Putting this 1,000-piece puzzle together may bring you some insight into Gorey’s creative process, but then again, it might just leave you happily baffled. Yes, the solution to this one is letter. Each group of pictures has a common theme. Together, they spell out a sentence, which then reveals the solution. However, these books and their associated metaphors get a little lost in translation. By now you may have already figured out what each book stands for, but here's that part of the puzzle anyway: One of my favorite puzzles is when you have to spot something that links a bunch of disparate objects or ideas. Finding patterns is the basis of science, it’s the basis of life. Here’s one with pictures, I’ll let you try and figure it out. That’ll be fun. What are these pictures of? I know. You can see all the tragedy but also the triumphs. You can see it all in the history of ciphers. So I’m a big fan. It’s a fun book.

Did you find this helpful?

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. Yes, the record is 3.5 seconds. It’s just mind-boggling. I can’t even twist it twice in 3.5 seconds.

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. Sheffer began his career as a journalist in the 1940s and worked for several newspapers, including the New York Post and the New York Daily News. In 1968, he began creating crossword puzzles for the New York Herald Tribune, and later worked for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.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. By the Book has an age rating of 8+, but I think that’s a tad conservative. My 5-year-olds were able to play this one with no issues. Sure, they did have some issues parsing some of the more difficult challenges, but for the most part, they understood what they needed to do and were able to be successful. In fact, they’ve gotten so into it, that I can just hand it to them and it keeps them busy (and out of my hair) for quite a while. Which is an absolute win in my book. 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. But I will say I gained respect for riddles because they can be poetry. It’s not just about solving the puzzle. They can be these extended metaphors that make you see life in a different way. Let me just read you one of my favorites. It’s from The Hobbit by Tolkien and I think it’s a lovely little bit of poetry. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.