National Observer Book of Crosswords

For me, this hits a sweet spot of difficult but not impossible. The definitions are generally fair, and there are few rare insects or other words known only to crossword puzzle users and Scrabble players.

This is a great crossword puzzle book. I have had this subscription for two years and purchased this at local bookstores for several years before starting a subscription. This year the book is much thinner. I would estimate it has about 25% less puzzles. I was disappointed.

Reasonably challenging. I like to see how many I can do in a row without a mistake, usually between 6 and 10. The Dell Sunday puzzles are a bit more challenging.

None of those kiddie puzzles here; and none so esoteric that you will need to email your genius friends- this series has entertained me through children's college interviews, others' shopping, hours of what would otherwise be tedium- can't do without it.

Been doing puzzles for 51 years and can't do these. Guess it's me.

I can rarely complete one of these, but I love the challenge. It is a good mix of fairly easy, fairly difficult, and totally impossible puzzles.

I do not enjoy the whole book idea od the puzzle on 2 pages. I like one puzzle on each page.

I have been a fan of National Observer crossword puzzles for years. The puzzles range from fairly easy to challenging. However, over the past couple years I have noticed a lot of errors in the publication and think that if there is one place there should be zero errors, it is in a crossword puzzle book. This drives me crazy. I have been tempted to call and apply for the job of proofreader! Another complaint I have is that too many of the puzzles are becoming "cutesy". They are not straight crossword puzzles but puzzles that, say, require you to leave out certain letters, or insert Roman numerals for letters,or have some other sort of twist. I realize that some people may enjoy this, but I just want the straight crosswords. Also, and this probably isn't the case in fact, but sometimes I get the feeling the puzzles must be fairly old, because many of the answers probably would completely elude anyone under the age of forty, which, unfortunately, I am not. Despite these flaws, this is still the best crossword puzzle publication on the market. I am giving it only four stars because of the first two issues addressed above.