For the love of puzzles
The Puzzler
A.J. Jacobs
Random House
Perhaps it's fitting that the new book by A.J. Jacobs is missing a piece. For The Puzzler, he's explored the world of Rubik's Cubes, crosswords and Sudokus. He's constructed and competed in scavenger hunts and talked chess with grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Yet his sprightly, far-reaching book was completed too late to make much room for Wordle, the puzzle phenomenon that went viral in late 2021. Nothing has helped us find Zen in the COVID-19 era, it seems, quite like spending a few minutes every day looking for a secret five-letter word.
Even without Wordle, there's room for a book like this from Jacobs, who specializes in stunt titles like 2004's The Know-itAll (for which he read an encyclopedia) or 2012's Drop Dead Healthy (about his pursuit of optimal fitness). Fans of puzzles are clearly seeking something. But what?
Jacobs doesn't avoid trying to deconstruct the obsession, but he's mostly here to have fun. He's mastered an avuncular and at times corny tone. And he often spotlights peculiar examples in the puzzle world: the person who can finish a Rubik's Cube in a second using his feet, the owner of a difficult Vermont corn maze, and puzzlers like Jim Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos, a 1990 sculpture at CIA headquarters that contains a code that's yet to be completely cracked.
The puzzle-world pros that Jacobs interviews have a few ideas about their fixations. Sometimes it's a craving for simplicity: “Life is a puzzle,” crossword constructor Peter Gordon tells him. “With crosswords, there is one correct answer.” Sometimes it's escape: One competitive jigsaw-er says, “I prefer solving jigsaw puzzles to solving people puzzles. The pieces don't talk back.” Sometimes it's self-improvement: “There is so much faulty thinking, and puzzles can help us think better,” says math and logic-puzzle pro Tanya Khovanova.
But the most persuasive explanation of puzzles' appeal comes from Sudoku inventor Maki Kaji, who devised an elegant visualization to explain the number game's experience: “? ? !” As with Sudokus, so with life: a challenge, plus mental effort applied to it, that results in some feeling of surprise or satisfaction. We're forever hunting for that exclamation point.
The book itself offers plenty of opportunities to do that chasing. It's lavishly illustrated with vintage puzzles: the very first Sudoku (published in 1979 under the homely name “Number Place”), a Soviet-era visual puzzle, a maze created by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, a 1969 chess puzzle by Vladimir Nabokov. It's also larded with a new batch of puzzles, created by Greg Pliska, that generally reside in the sweet spot of entertaining and frustrating that all good puzzles require. And the book contains a secret puzzle — its first solver will win $10,000.
That purse will no doubt improve the life of whoever wins it. But The Puzzler mainly shows that we make too much of puzzles as vehicles for our betterment. At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness.