In which we put our heads in the sand

The other day, I was rummaging around on the intertubes, and I landed on a TimesMachine page for a 1952 copy of the New York Times. What really intrigued me wasn't the newsy stuff on that page, the stuff I'd been looking for - but that on the lower right hand corner appeared a crossword puzzle! An edited by Margaret Farrar puzzle, from 1952.

Being a person who *really* likes doing the NYT puzzle every single day in pen, I grabbed the puzzle image and printed it out for my train ride home.

And man, it is HARD. It is larded with things I had to look up - like "Creator of Mr. Tutt" and "Governor of Hawaii" and "Senator from Tacoma". And it's full of uncommon (archaic) words like the answers to "Assumes presumptuously" and "Roasted" and "Splinter". And then there was the blasé generic "Actress from Germany". I did get "White House initials-to-be" right off the bat because that answer still turns up in current puzzles - though clued way differently (i.e. W.W. II hero who retired from the mil. to run for president or H.S.T.'s successor or Onetime White House inits.)

All in all, it was an entertaining and engaging exercise but I hope to not encounter a "Relative of the civet" or a "Two-year-old sheep" anytime soon.

If you'd like to try, here you go:

And the 2025 classic read is ...

Middlemarch. Yes, I've read it before - I read it in college for English 272, which was a survey class on some 19th century Brit Lit classics. (I still have the asssigned copy, which is why I know what specific class it was ... I wrote it inside the cover.)

But Middlemarch slithered into my consciousness because of that column in the New York Times Book Review called "By The Book" - a weekly interview with some author who has just published something. I skim it every week, and often it's too twee for words, but what I started to notice was how many people mentioned Middlemarch in response to a question.

• What books are on your night stand?
• What books are you embarrassed to admit you’ve never read?
• What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
• What’s the last great book you read?
• Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Because this had come up in conversation, on Sunday, my sister texted me a picture of the 12/29/2024 book review because yes, Elda Rotor named Middlemarch as something she was embarrassed not to have read.

In a fit of something or other, I sat down at my computer and I methodically searched the Times website for the entirety of 2024, and located 51 of the 52 "By The Book"columns. There may have been one on 9/1/24 - but I couldn't surface it. And 11 times in 51 weeks, someone answered Middlemarch. That's 20 or 22% of the time! (Math is complicated because Robert Kagan gave Middlemarch as the answer to two different questions in the same interview.)  If you would like to see the fruits of my labors, I made a spreadsheet - it's here. 

This is a long way around to explain why I'm cracking Middlemarch open later.