Customer Reviews

The New York Times Easy Crossword Puzzle Omnibus Volume 6: 200 Solvable Puzzles from the Pages of The New York Times

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book for my mom who was having a hard time finding "medium" difficulty crossword puzzle books. All the easy books are too easy and the hard too hard. Some of those combination books that went from easy to hard seem to skip the medium difficulty. So I thought I'd give the NY Times Easy books a try. I figured maybe that would be what we considered to be medium. Sure enough! She loves it! She, my sister, and I absolutely love this book. We bought other volumes and found them to be just the right amount of difficult as well. If you consider the NY Times puzzles way over your head but find the grocery store books too easy, this one will suit you perfectly.

I really, really wanted to get better at crossword puzzles, and I love Will Shortz. This was the best way for me to do it, so I didn't have to wade through really tough ones in a "best of" book. I'd never done any crosswords regularly before I bought this book, and at first I could only get maybe four or five answers per puzzle. I cheated a bit--sometimes by googling an answer, sometimes just by looking in the back of the book--and I loved that because it helped me learn the psychology of the puzzles. Slowly but surely, I got better, and ended up finishing almost all the puzzles in the book, many without cheating at all.

Now I can sometimes even do the medium puzzles in the NY Times...

I bought this book for my wife who enjoys the New York Times daily crossword puzzles but who finds any puzzle beyond Wednesdays' a little too challenging to be fun. For those not familiar with the NY Times pattern, puzzles start out being very easy on Mondays, growing increasingly harder throughout the week with Saturday's being the most difficult. Sunday's is considered to be about the same as a Thursday-level puzzle. As stated, the puzzles in this book are taken from the Monday and Tuesday editions of the paper. All that said, about half-way through the book, my wife was saying that these were too easy. I guess that the next book we get will be made entirely of Wednesday puzzles.

So, four stars for being everything it says it claims to be; minus one for being less than entirely satisfying.

I have used several other volumes in this series and find some of the puzzles in this edition very challenging. Other are clearly designed for the beginning crossword puzzle solver.