Customer Reviews

Simon & Schuster Super Crossword Book #11 (Simon & Schuster Super Crossword Books)

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I love crosswords and do at least one a day. But they must be Sunday-sized, and Sunday comes only once a week. This volume contains 225 challenging crosswords by different creators, edited by pros Eugene Maleska and John Samson. Nice format, too, as each puzzle can be removed from the book by perforations. When we travel, I tear out a dozen or so to tuck into the carry-on. Excellent value, providing hours and hours of diversion for only $10.00.

These puzzles are standard difficulty level for NYT type puzzles. You run into some familiar good constructors with some of the puzzles, such as Jorgenson, Milhauser, and Osborn. The paper is nice to work on and the perforations make tearing out each page easy. Obviously, the quantity of puzzles (225) is nice, too.

I wasn't expecting a difficulty level equal to the hardest New York Times Sunday puzzles of today. I rarely have trouble with solving any crossword puzzle, but I'm about halfway through the book, and I do have a few comments. For people like me, who don't expect to be really challenged but do want time-consuming at least: Many of the puzzles are quite short--like daily size. Many of these are quite easy, with simple grids. Naturally, this means running through puzzles very rapidly. With harder puzzles, almost 100% of the difficulty is due to obscure proper names--either people or places. In some cases, it is the result of rare vocabulary words. Themes are not particularly unusual. Clues are not often creative or difficult. Often, the clue is simply a synonym of the answer. And when I hit a puzzle in which the same answer was used twice, I admit I was irritated by the apparent sloppiness.

OK, complaints out of the way, the actual Sunday size puzzles aren't bad. (Although a few are in extremely tiny type.) Even when the difficulty lies with obscure geography or, say, a bunch of opera people you never heard of, it is fun to challenge yourself with them. So far, I'd say I've enjoyed about half the puzzles, so given the number available, that's pretty good.