Puzzled

In the middle of The Puzzler (2022), A.J. Jacobs writes, "As a kid, I suffered from mild OCD and I had many strange rituals." That explains a lot. Maybe Jacobs hasn't entirely outgrown that obsessive-compulsive disorder. That may, in fact, be the secret of his success.

Jacobs has written a series of popular books that perhaps only someone with "mild OCD" could have written. In The Know-It-All he describes his experience of reading through the entire Encylopaedia Brittanica from beginning to end. In The Year of Living Biblically he tells of trying to follow every law in the Hebrew Bible, including all those dietary ones, to the letter. And so on.

Now in The Puzzler, he writes about all the major forms of puzzles, from crosswords and sudokus to jigsaws and Rubik's cubes. More than that, he seeks to obtain and solve the hardest of them. He participates in an international jigsaw puzzle contest. He tackles nearly impossible mazes and purchases a puzzle that, even if a person knew what he was doing and worked at it nonstop, would take billions of years to solve.

Yet it is the author's immersion in these puzzles that makes his book so fascinating. His sense of humor also helps.  He interviews puzzle creators and the best puzzle solvers. He even interviews the great chess champion Garry Kasparov about chess puzzles.

One need not be either obsessive or compulsive, or even enjoy puzzles, to find pleasure in this book.