Book Review-The Puzzler by AJ Jacobs

I started reading this book a while ago. I had heard about it from social media and thought it would be a fun thing to read. I know the name AJ Jacobs from his reputation as a writer who deeply embeds himself, as he had gained notoriety from his book: The Year of Living Biblically, where he tried to literally live as the bible dictates.

This book drew my interest because it involved puzzles, many different kinds of puzzles, puzzles that I did not know even existed. I didn’t know what to expect;  what I can say after reading it is that this will be a book that I will keep as a reference and re-read many times, as the stories that Jacobs writes about each of the different puzzles are all fascinating.

The book consists of eighteen chapters, each one dedicated to a type of puzzle. Of course, the most common and popular puzzle, the crossword puzzle, starts the book off. Jacobs foreshadows  the format of his later chapters by first giving us the history of the crossword; in this case,  how the crossword came into being. He narrowed his focus on The New York Times crossword puzzles.

Parenthetically, I owe Jacobs a great deal of  gratitude; because of him I am now a regular solver of the Spelling Bee puzzle in the New York Times. I got the Spelling Bee bug ever since I started reading the book, I even managed to achieve the Queen Bee status, getting all the words and all the points in that particular Spelling Bee puzzle. It was an extremely challenging experience, but I'm glad I did it just to say that I did it.

In the second chapter he delves into the puzzle of puzzles. Why are puzzles so addicting? Why are puzzles so appealing to people? Why do people put themselves through the trying efforts of  solving the puzzle? It gives us a good account of why we do what we do.

He covers the Rubik's Cube in the third chapter. The Rubik's Cube came out when I was in high school. I was able to resist the temptation to being immersed in that puzzle, but it's been around for a long time, the photo of the 33 by 33 by 33 cube was epic.

Jacobs then proceeds to give us the history and the attractions of all the puzzles that he covers:  anagrams, rebuses, jigsaw puzzles, math and logic puzzles, riddles, Sudokus, and many others.

I highly recommend that Jigsaw puzzle chapter. It is a puzzle that we are familiar with, but apparently there is a global competition celebrating the jigsaw puzzle. This is where Jacobs penchant for embedding himself into the subject comes alive. He managed to get his family into the world's championship of jigsaw puzzle, went to Spain to compete in this championship. How did he and his family get selected? It seems that no one else in the US was interested enough to qualify. I will wager that this situation has changed.

Jacobs also delves into the technicalities of creating these puzzles in each chapter as well as giving the readers samples of each kind of puzzle, to pique our interest in delving further. It works, I tried a few of the samples and then promised myself that I would return to do the others. I will too. I may not do it immediately, but I will return to things that interest me. 

I really enjoyed the broad spectrum of puzzles that Jacobs covered. Even though I am a math and science person, many assumes that the Sudokus and Kendoku chapter would be my sweet spot.  They aren’t.  I don't enjoy doing them because the puzzle does not integrate mathematical ideas in them, it is just playing with number order, but I do enjoy the story of its origination.

One chapter that I enjoyed was on riddles because he delved into the life of Lewis Carroll or Charles Dodgson, the Oxford Mathematics Don. Dodgson very much enjoyed creating stories and puzzles for his nieces, as he was also an amazing riddle master, he is the author of numerous riddles, I sought them out to challenge myself, all because of Jacob's chapter on riddles,

Probably the most fascinating chapter is about the Japanese puzzle boxes. They came out of the jewelry box tradition as the makers of the puzzle boxes  try to make the puzzle box difficult to solve to keep the jewelry safe. I imagine that there are more than a few owners who had forgotten how to open those puzzle boxes so that their jewelry is forever inside these boxes. The intricacies and workmanship that goes into these boxes and all other puzzle boxes are unbelievable. Reading and looking at the pictures in the book sparked my interest. I found myself looking at YouTube videos on how people create these boxes. One of the puzzle box makers, an American named Kagen Sound, look him up, once designed a desk with 22 different puzzles built into it for a film. All the puzzles are devilishly clever.

The chapter on math and logic puzzles satisfied my curiosity about those topics that I am supposed to be good at. I was not obsessed with it, but it made my mind wonder and wander.

A key chapter is Chapter 9, on ciphers and secret codes. A sculpture was placed in the front of the CIA headquarters in Virginia. The puzzle is called Kryptos, it is a piece of art that was commissioned by the CIA. Nobody knows the answer to the puzzle except for the artist who created and possibly the former director of CIA. It has been 30 years since the sculpture has been put in a courtyard in the CIA headquarters. The cryptologists of the CIA have had this piece of art sitting at their workplace, challenging them, daring them, and mocking them, and yet the sculpture stands unsolved. They have been able to crack the first three sections, but the main puzzle, the fourth section, they have not been able to solve. Perhaps sensing his own mortality, the artist has been giving hints for the last ten years, there are internet groups solely devoted to solving this part of this puzzle, so far to no avail. Think about the situation, the top cryptologists at the CIA, the best of the best and the brightest of the bright are still stumped, even after 30 years, that was fascinating to me.

Overall. I enjoyed the book. The added sample puzzles at the end of each chapter, meant to give us a taste of each of the topics, as well as the solutions to those samples certainly keeps the curiosity high.

To stimulate the curiosity and interest stirred up by the book on puzzles, Jacobs offers at the very end of the book two challenges. The first, The Puzzler contest, offers a $10K reward. The contest ends May 3, 2023. The clues are hidden in the web page associated with the book. The second one is a series of 19 puzzles which covers all the myriad types of puzzles covered in the book.