New York Times Will Shortz Presents A Year of Crosswords: 365 Puzzles to Keep You Sharp

Will Short is the NY Times Crossword expert. The easy ones are not very challenging; the medium ones are challenging; and the hard ones are super hard. I do the NY Times Crossword every Sunday and finish it more than half the time. These are much harder than most; however, they will give you hours of entertainment.

I love love love this collection of New York Times crosswords! It has them separated between Easy, Medium, and Hard. The box is somewhat large, but not too bulky to carry around. The pages are a nice quality and not too flimsy. It can definitely handle some wear and tear. The puzzles are also fairly new so no worrying about the clues being out-dated. There are enough puzzles to keep you busy for quite some time.

I'm a 20-something and just discovered that I LOVE crossword puzzles. If you're new like me, I would suggest getting a book of all Easy/Monday crossword puzzles and then work your way up. I'm not sure if it's just me, but the easy puzzles seem to get progressively harder, so I've gotten about 50-60 in and can't really do any more (they've gotten a little over my head).... But I'm still learning, so it's all good. I do love this book for it's size, it fits perfectly in my medium sized purse.

My husband and I are just beginning crosswords. We hope to do one a day. So far, so good. I love that each puzzle increases in difficulty as we get better and better at them!

As in all these crossword books, the puzzles are of variable quality with some being very entertaining and others being somewhat dull and silly. This, of course, reflects the multiple authorships. The puzzles are classified into easy, medium and hard. Therefore, you can choose your crossword depending on your mood and the amount of time you have available to solve it. This crossword book does not suffer from the common problem of recycled puzzles from older books as far as I can tell. The only caution I'd add is that the print is very tiny and you'll need reading glasses if you are older to read the clues. I've enjoyed solving these puzzles and I can recommend this more recent book from 2013 to all crossword fans.