The New York Times Ferocious Crosswords: 150 Hard Puzzles (New York Times Crossword Puzzles) Paperback – March 3, 2009

Sent to a friend and she loved it

How to make a crossword puzzle difficult is no secret: You fill it full of names—obscure actors, artists, authors, athletes, and so on—so that it becomes as much a trivia game as a word game. That shouldn’t discourage serious crossword enthusiasts; we all expect to look up a few solutions on the Internet if we want to complete the puzzle. Keeping cheats to a minimum is still desirable, however, and the “Ferocious” collection requires more than usual—an average of 4-5 per puzzle. For comparison with some of Will Shortz’s other challenging collections, “Fascinatingly Fierce” needs 0-1 look-ups per puzzle, and “Double Shot” requires 2-3, so, yes, these puzzles are ferocious. You may want to consider alternating them with easier puzzles from Shortz’s “Tension Taming” collection.

✫ Hats off to anyone that finds this doable.✫ Unthemed, so no punny headings to help you navigate.✫ Heavy on obscure questions, but light on clever ones.✫ Small, 6 by 9 inch book with 3x3 inch puzzles.✫ The font size is larger than that in my NY volume 42, but it's still only about a 10 pt font.✫ The reason I find this book so challenging is that I can't seem to get a foot hold. Typically, I find one or several answers I'm sure about and work from there. But this book seldom features anything black and white, so I'm left unsure about any answer I put down.✫Far too challenging for me, but I guess "ferocious" should have prepared me for that.✫Sticking with Sunday puzzles because they're challenging without feeling impossible.

Got this as a Christmas present for my mom, she loves crosswords and enjoys the more challenging ones. Knocked a star off bc the book is smaller than anticipated and harder to navigate through.

This is a fabulous book! The difficulty with crossword books is finding a book that's really challenging without being too hard to be fun. This really hits the spot for me. I can do the Saturday NYTimes crossword without help 90 percent of the time, but I'm not a "speed solver" of the Rex Parker ilk and these puzzles are just the right amount of tough for me. They are only occasionally too obscure for me--mostly it's just the cleverness of the cluing that trips me up. If anyone can recommend a book with a similar degree of difficulty, I'd love to know about it.

Too hard. No fun.

This was a gift and he loved it! Said it had some stumpers in it which he loves a challenge. So... yay me on nailing the perfect gift!

Great gift for my grandmother

My aunt is a seasoned crossword’er, so I was all too happy to find this Ferocious Crossword book. It keeps her happily entertained and sometimes stumped! Recommend for anyone who frequents crosswords and is seeking a bit of a challenge

While these are tough puzzles, they are not individually selected for toughness or anything, all they have done is reprinted every Friday puzzle from 2008 and 2009. As a result, what was contemporary and edgy ten years ago is no longer memorable now, sometimes the website and tech references are either defunct or very obscure sounding to our 2018 ears. Its still a good book, but just be prepared to think back to rap songs and sitcom actors from the early 2000s if you want to get the full solve experience.

The crosswords in this book are exceptionally hard which was the perfect gift for an avid New York crossword solver. Highly recommended as a gift for an individual who finds regular crosswords too easy- this should give them something to really think about and keep them busy! I only wish this book came in a spiral binding format as it would be easier to utilize.

Got this as a gift for an avid crossword lover, she loves/curses how hard it is.

I like the size of the book, but I’m plowing through them one or two a day.