A review by beetific
Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel

3.0

This started off really strong and I really loved the first couple of chapters - there’s a lot of discussion of the history of crosswords and the NYT crossword/design. However, I found myself a little bit lost as I kept on reading it because it seemed to straddle the line between being a memoir of sorts and a book *about* crosswords (I had this issue when I reas Flaneuse, a couple of years ago). I think I went into it thinking it would be more of the latter, but there were a lot of tidbits thrown in that didn’t really seem to add anything to the book. I definitely learned a lot of interesting history about crosswords and their place in society over time, but I think I would have appreciated a little bit more research into “modern” crosswords (crosswords other than the NYT, for example) as well as how constructors are changing and the space is becoming more inclusive these days (this is mentioned, but I felt like it was too cursory).