Slow, slow, slow — that's the overwhelming feel of Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession, by Marc Romano. No doubt he's fast at doing tough puzzles. But does that mean he has to say everything at least two or three times, in somewhat different language, permuted and reordered and paraphrased? Perhaps this 200+ page book is a magazine article that took steroids. Maybe it's an unconscious metaphor for a set of crosswords themselves, with interlocking anecdotes like the obscure vowel-rich words that recur in far too many grids. Or it could be that for somebody who loves the subject, redundancy is comforting rather than distracting.

(cf. TooSlowAndTooFast (1999-09-25), ...) - ^z - 2011-12-16