So, in your book, you tried to visit people who are very, very involved with basically every single type of puzzle you could think of? 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? 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. So first on your list is My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner. The publisher blurb suggests these are puzzles 9- to 12-year-olds can do so, hopefully, most people can manage them. Tell me a bit about this book.

The Best Puzzle Books - Five Books Expert Recommendations

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. 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.

Diaries & Calendars

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. 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? Let’s go on to Masquerade by Kit Williams, which is an armchair treasure hunt. This was a big deal, I think. 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. 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.

Puzzle and Quiz Books | WHSmith Puzzle and Quiz Books | WHSmith

As someone who never managed to do more than one side of the Rubik’s Cube, I was quite impressed reading that chapter. I definitely got into puzzles through the words. I am a word nerd. Crosswords were my first love. I don’t know if you read the intro to my book, but a few years ago, I was the answer to a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was the highlight of my life. My wedding was pretty good, but this was the holy grail. To me, part of what I love about puzzles is that they fuel my curiosity and I’d say curiosity and gratitude are my two favorite virtues. My last book was about gratitude; this book is all about curiosity. Curiosity is what drives puzzlers. They’re like, ‘Why is it? What is it?’ There’s a great puzzler, Maki Kaji, who is called the godfather of Sudoku. He summarized puzzles in three symbols: the question mark, the forward arrow, and the exclamation point. The question mark is when you first see a puzzle, and you’re baffled; the arrow is the struggle for solutions, the exploration; and then the exclamation point is that aha moment. He said you have to embrace the arrow; you have to love the search. It’s a more poetic way of saying you have got to embrace the journey. So that’s another thing I love about puzzles, that search.

Hobbies

This book is a collection of very clever puzzles. The author is mysterious and goes by the pseudonym M. Some are pictures, some are codes, and some are wordplay. One thing I love about them is that you have to use different types of thinking and solving techniques. Elonka Dunin teamed up with a German writer, Klaus Schmeh, who has a blog about cryptics and ciphers throughout history, and they wrote this book together. It’s a guide of how to break ciphers but you also get a lot of history, everything from World War Two to Roman ciphers. I just love it. I’d say there are several things that are alluring about puzzles. One is the search for the aha moment when you actually solve a puzzle. I get an actual dopamine rush from it, the same chemical that—they say—you get from cocaine and sex and all that. So, for me, it is similar to a drug. 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. 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?

Logic Puzzles for Adults: 50 fantastic logic puzzles plus 50

Lardone A, Liparoti M, Sorrentino P, et al. Mindfulness meditation is related to long-lasting changes in hippocampal functional topology during resting state: A magnetoencephalography study. Neural Plast. 2018;2018:5340717. doi:10.1155/2018/5340717 Over 750 questions and featured films include: Love, Actually, Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, The Grinch, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Scrooged, Bridget Jones's Diary, Harry Potter, The Holiday, Die Hard (yes) and many, many more! 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.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. 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 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. 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.