Who Needs Sudoku?
...when you've got crossword puzzles, and a smart new movie to celebrate them
By RICHARD CORLISS Posted Saturday, Jun. 17, 2006
Every decade or so, a fad comes out of nowhere and sweeps the world. It helps if it's inane: Frisbees and hula hoops (the '50s), polyester pant suits ('70s), the Macarena ('90s). Then the fever subsides and disappears, leaving parents to explain to their kids what the commotion was all about. The usual lame response: "It was...fun."
The latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves.
...---... When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds. ...---...