Tag Archives: Book review

PuzzleNation Book Review: World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements

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Welcome to the sixth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features John Hunter’s World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.

What did you do in fourth grade, fellow puzzlers? Did you master long division, or delve into the history of the Civil War, or expand your vocabulary skills? The kids in John Hunter’s fourth-grade class negotiated lucrative trade agreements, solved global warming, and saved the world.

Yeah, I know. I feel like a slacker now too.

I frequently post articles that reinforce my heartfelt belief that puzzles and the skills we develop solving puzzles make the world a better, more interesting place. And the World Peace Game, John Hunter’s marvelous brainchild, takes empty-space learning to a whole new level.

Instead of regimented, test-based education, empty-space learning encourages students to learn and fail by doing, developing social skills, a deeper sense of the world’s complexity, and an appreciation for hard questions.

The World Peace Game is a fantastic example of what empty-space learning can do. A weeks-long interactive experiment wherein students try to solve real-world problems in a complex, multitiered simulation, kids will tackle poverty, war, environmental cataclysm, terrorism, ethical dilemmas, and more as they manage their imaginary nations.

World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements chronicles the lessons Hunter has learned from developing and running the World Peace Game for groups of all ages, offering dozens of examples of problems encountered — and circumvented — by young minds, each with a core lesson and something to celebrate.

This is pure puzzle-solving at work on a massive, cooperative scale, and just reading this book gave me hope for the future. World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements is a warm, funny, utterly optimistic testament to what creativity and innovative problem solving can accomplish.

[For further information on the World Peace Game, as well as World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, click here.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

PuzzleNation Book Review: The Riddle of the Labyrinth

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Welcome to the fifth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around — our first nonfiction book review — features Margalit Fox’s work The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.

When archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the first of hundreds of preserved tablets from a dig on the island of Crete, he had no idea he was unveiling a puzzle that would last for decades.

Linear B.

It has all the trappings of a classic mystery: an exotic setting, an uncrackable code, a cast of brilliant and curious people brought together to solve it, and a final, world-changing deductive leap to the finish. The Riddle of the Labyrinth is the story of how the conundrum of Linear B was resolved, framed by the life stories of the three people most responsible for conquering a 50-year mystery.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth is terrific, a perfect fusion of historical writing and investigative reporting that presents an incredible mental and deductive achievement as a slow-boil mystery, and by doing so, rewrites the established narrative to spread the credit around.

The writing is meticulous and painstakingly detailed, allowing the reader to truly understand, sometimes graphic by graphic, how each breakthrough in the solving process was made, and just how phenomenal the detective work involved truly was.

I’ve written about real-life examples of codecracking in the past, but they all pale in comparison to the enormity and complexity of what Alice Elizabeth Kober and Michael Ventris accomplished when they unraveled the riddle of Linear B.

It’s impressive in the extreme that Fox was able to make some high-level deduction and linguistic skill so easily understood by the average reader. Even fans of cryptograms and other codebreaking-style puzzles could learn a great deal from Kober’s techniques and Fox’s wonderfully thorough and easily-parsed step-by-step analysis.

By citing examples like The Dancing Men from the famous Sherlock Holmes story, Fox provides great shortcuts for the reader, removing none of the wonder of Kober and Ventris’ accomplishments while still clearing away so much potential confusion.

In short, this is science writing, history writing, and storytelling in top form. What a treat.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (three volumes to choose from!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

5 Questions for author Robin Sloan

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Welcome to the second edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s newest feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m excited to have Robin Sloan as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Robin Sloan is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which has garnered critical acclaim for both its writing (named one of the best 100 books of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle) and its cover design (named one of the 25 best book covers by Bookpage).

The book spent time on the New York Times bestseller list (Hardcover Fiction section) and was named Editor’s Choice by the Times. (Check out our review of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore here!)

Robin was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Robin Sloan

1. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore has that wonderful new-medium-vs.-old-medium conflict at its heart, but as a puzzle fan, I found a similar conflict beneath the surface. Some puzzles are too tough, some answers will elude us, and that’s part of what makes the challenge so enticing. But there’s also the disappointment that can follow victory. After all, if the unsolvable puzzle turns out to be solvable after all, the answer might be unsatisfying. And where do you go from there, once the quest is over?

Were those questions that were important to you during the writing of the book? How do you view the puzzle at the heart of the story?

J. J. Abrams often talks about something he calls the Mystery Box—basically, it’s the secret at the center of a story. And it’s amazing how potent it can be; I mean really, you just close a door or lock a chest and suddenly, you’ve got the basic kernel of a narrative; you’ve got a reason for readers to ask, “What happens next?” But it’s a double-edged sword: the heavier you lean on a Mystery Box for narrative momentum, the higher the stakes for the ultimate reveal. It turns out there aren’t too many secrets that can stand up to a book or movie’s worth of anticipation. So, I think it’s a balancing act: you can set up your Mystery Box, but it can’t be the ONLY thing drawing readers forward. You need to buttress it with smaller challenges; with fun characters; with a compelling voice.

2. The book also features a truly high-end bucket list item of mine: uncovering and infiltrating a secret society. Penumbra and his fellow devotees are like many hardcore puzzle fans, operating by an internal logic and set of rules entirely their own (as most fandoms and hobby groups do). Was there a particular group or organization that served as inspiration for you?

None of these are nearly as arcane as the secret society in Penumbra, but I do have a real fondness and respect for old-fashioned private lending libraries. I’m thinking, for instance, of the New York Society Library in Mahattan, or the Mechanics’ Institute Library & Chess Club here in San Francisco. I love public libraries too, of course; but every time I’ve walked into one of these private libraries, I’ve gotten a little thrill that is, I imagine, similar in flavor—if not magnitude—to the feeling of discovering an honest-to-God secret society.

3. If you’d been presented with a mystery like the one in your book, would you have taken the Google road or the slow-and-steady grind of Penumbra’s visitors?

Oh, Google all the way. I mean, we live in a remarkable time! It’s possible for anyone with a modicum of technical ability to sign up for Amazon’s cloud services and bring dozens—or hundreds, even thousands—of virtual computers to bear on a problem. I’ve poked at those tools around their edges—when I worked at Twitter, for instance, I got to know the distributed data-processing software called Hadoop—and I find them totally thrilling. It’s a different kind of problem-solving… a different way of using your brain and, ultimately, your time.

4. What’s next for Robin Sloan?

I’m working on another novel. It’s not perhaps quite as puzzle-y as Penumbra, but I think there will be plenty of secrets waiting in this book’s plot, too.

5. If you could give the readers, writers, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Well, following up on what we were talking about earlier, I really do think that, in the year 2013, people ought to know how to code, at least a little bit. The good news is that there are better resources to learn than ever before—services like Codecademy. You can find tutorials for almost any kind of programming problem; I feel like I’ve learned to code mostly through the Google search prompt. And finally, some people share their own tales of learning; Diana Kimball’s post here is a great example. It all starts with a problem you yourself want to solve—something small, something personal. Maybe even… a puzzle?

Many thanks to Robin Sloan for his time. Check out Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore on his website, and follow him on Twitter (@robinsloan)! I can’t wait to see what he’s got for us next.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

PuzzleNation Book Review: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

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Welcome to the fourth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features Robin Sloan’s novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Clay Jannon just lost his web-development job, and on a whim, he stumbles into a strange bookstore looking for a new night clerk. With stories-high shelves loaded with strange books that aren’t for sale, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is more like a library for an eccentric smattering of visitors who come and go at all hours, checking out a single book at a time for reasons that elude Clay.

As Clay’s small circle of friends is drawn into the mystery of Mr. Penumbra’s store, Clay discovers a curious pattern dictating which book each visitor will select next, unintentionally taking the first step into tackling far greater and more peculiar secrets.

Whimsical yet still grounded in a believable world, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is never what you expect. Wrapped in layers upon layers of curiosities — a puzzle within a puzzle about a puzzle, you could say — the book incorporates elements of urban fantasy, coming-of-age stories, and old-school mysteries to tell a wonderful story about the irresistable allure of a quest.

Every character in the book, from Clay’s friends to Mr. Penumbra’s patrons, falls into a situation plenty of puzzle devotees are quite familiar with: confronting a puzzle that seems unsolvable. That thread, that idea of a challenge awaiting if you’re just clever enough to conquer it, is a tantalizing one, and it drives a good chunk of the book’s plot.

What’s truly engaging about Sloan’s story, though, is its willingness to acknowledge the potential for disappointment from both sides. After all, some puzzles are too tough, some answers will elude us, and that’s part of what makes the challenge so enticing. But there’s also the disappointment that can follow victory. After all, if the unsolvable puzzle turns out to be solvable after all, will you be satisfied with the answer? And what comes next?

This double-bladed sword of possibilities elevates an already-intriguing plot and a thoroughly likable cast of characters into something truly enjoyable. This is a book rich in detail, setting, and charm, and even in the slow moments, your interest never flags.

The modern setting also added depth to both the mystery and how the characters confronted it. The book could’ve easily condemned paper books as old fashioned or e-readers as an obnoxious affront, but instead, it charts the highs and lows of the crossroads between print publishing and electronic media, allowing the best of both worlds to shine as the characters delve deeper into the mysteries surrounding Mr. Penumbra’s bizarre bookshop.

You know, the puzzle world can seem like such a secret society sometimes, working by its own weird rules and internal logic, and to see a book tackle that idea with such charm and lightness was a real treat. I look forward to seeing what Robin Sloan cooks up next.

Well, that’s it for the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews. I hope you enjoyed the post and look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.

PuzzleNation Book Review: The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady

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Welcome to the third installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features Parnell Hall’s novel The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady.

Cora Felton is known far and wide as the Puzzle Lady, powerhouse puzzlemaker and occasional crimesolver, but her reign may be over. Minami, the Sudoku Lady, has come from Japan to challenge Cora for pride, PR, and puzzle-bragging rights. But when dead bodies start turning up and Minami is fingered as the culprit, it’s up to Cora to clear the competition’s good name.

Now, before I get into the review, it’s confession time. This is the second time around for me with this book. I read it a few years ago, and didn’t particularly enjoy it. But I was also sick as a dog at the time, so I wanted to be sure that my general foul mood at the time didn’t impair my ability to appreciate what I was reading at the time.

Turns out my illness had nothing to do with it.

The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is part of Parnell Hall’s Puzzle Lady Mystery series — which he’s been publishing at the rate of a book a year since 2000 — and I sincerely hope it’s not indicative of the rest of the series. The reader plows through a needlessly convoluted story, confronted by a population of unpleasant characters and a protagonist who is unlikable in the extreme. She’s more grating than curmudgeonly.

Now, to be fair, that’s not to say that bright spots in the novel don’t exist. Hall has a natural adeptness with wordplay and his nigh-Vaudevillian exchanges of dialogue are engaging. Sadly, however, both are severely undermined by the unsympathetic cast of characters.

The sudoku and crossword puzzles included within are both an interesting gimmick and a pleasant treat; my own penchant for puzzling would not be ignored, and I solved each puzzle as it appeared. Unfortunately, those were calm spots in an otherwise stormy narrative.

I must conclude that The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady is at best an uneven reading experience. (Though I might try another Puzzle Lady Mystery someday, for curiosity’s sake.)

Well, I hope you enjoyed the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.

PuzzleNation Book Review: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

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Welcome to the second installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features Eric Berlin’s novel The Puzzling World of Winston Breen.

That name might look familiar. Yes, Eric and I are both contributors to the PuzzleNation blog. You may think that biases my review in some way, but I assure you it doesn’t. Yes, we both work on the same blog, but Eric stole my lunch money once, and I think that evens things out nicely. Remember: coworker + stolen lunch money = objectivity.

Anyway.

Young Winston Breen is a puzzling fiend, and most everyone in his town knows his penchant for puzzles is unmatched. So when the box he buys his little sister for her birthday turns out to have a secret compartment with a puzzle inside, everyone assumes Winston is behind it. But he’s not, and worse yet, he can’t solve the puzzle at all.

Winston and his chums start investigating where the puzzle came from, but after a curious encounter with the town librarian and crossing paths with a few shady characters, he soon discovers his puzzle is part of a much larger mystery: an actual treasure hunt. Can Winston, his pals, and these strange treasure hunters unravel a 25-year-old puzzle? More importantly, who can Winston trust?

I’ve seen this book described elsewhere as The Da Vinci Code for younger readers, but honestly, I enjoyed this book a lot more than Dan Brown’s efforts. The Puzzling World of Winston Breen is not only a fun read and chock full of all sorts of puzzles — some central to the mystery, others as stand-alone little challenges — but it’s a delightful romp of a story.

The voices of the younger characters all ring true, avoiding the common YA pitfall of having preternaturally sharp protagonists and supporting characters. Winston is often flummoxed by the challenges and obstacles he encounters, but he never gives up, always looking for another solution or pathway to solving whatever problem he faces.

But I also appreciate the lingering sense of menace to the book’s central mystery. You never lose that feeling that there’s some potential danger involved. With break-ins, vague threats, and shady characters with their own agenda, that shadowy feeling doesn’t overwhelm the more carefree puzzle-solving fun of the book, but it does add some stakes to the treasure hunt itself, which I quite enjoyed.

A quick and immensely charming read — the first in a series — The Puzzling World of Winston Breen is perfect for younger readers and puzzlers alike. (Check out the website by clicking here!)

Well, I hope you enjoyed the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews, and I look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.