Favorite crosswords of 2009

Rex Parker and I aren’t compiling an official set of 2009 Oryx Awards (we hope to do it up big for 2010, though), but I wanted to spotlight the puzzles that enchanted me last year. This list will be heavily weighted towards the types of puzzles I like best (twisty gimmicks! themeless!) and light on others (hello, easy themed puzzles).

My list is long, so it appears after the jump.

Easy themed puzzle:

• Doug Peterson‘s 6/3/09 CrosSynergy crossword, “Child’s Play”—Accessible theme, terrific fill.

Medium themed puzzles:

• Byron Walden‘s 9/2/09 Onion A.V. Club crossword featuring JULIE AND JULIA intersecting four other entries with related name pairs drawn from the arts (cinema, song, Shakespeare): ME AND JULIO, JULIUS AND ETHEL, ROMEO AND JULIET, and JULES ET JIM. Incredible theme content and structure. The non-theme fill sparkles, too, with answers like SOUP NAZI and JOCK ITCH.
• Ed Stein and Paula Gamache‘s 4/1/09 New York Times April Fools Day crossword appears to give away the theme answers in the clues, but no: [In what country are Panama hats made?] clues ECUADOR, and [What is George Eliot’s given name?] clues MARY ANN. Tons of fun to solve.
• Donna Hoke Kahwaty‘s 3/12/09 Los Angeles Times crossword featuring phrases whose first words can follow SPAGHETTI, such as SQUASH COURTS and WESTERN UNION. Lively!
• Francis Heaney‘s 11/4/09 Onion A.V. Club crossword featuring BAKING B.B. KING, HEROES’ HERPES, and other advance-one-letter-in-the-alphabet gems.
• Donna S. Levin‘s 1/22/09 Los Angeles Times crossword with four numerical TV show titles cut by 1 (e.g., FIVE FEET UNDER, TWENTY-NINE ROCK).

Sunday puzzles:

• Elizabeth C. Gorski‘s 10/18/09 New York Times crossword, “Ahead of the Curve”—This asymmetrical grid contains a Guggenheim spiral and answers relating to the museum (including artists’ names clued by their works of art held by the Guggenheim), all in honor of the Guggenheim’s 50th anniversary. Arty and elegant.
• Elizabeth C. Gorski‘s 3/29/09 New York Times crossword, “Architectural Drawing”—This is the EIFFEL TOWER puzzle with connect-the-dot ET rebus squares outlining the Tower’s shape, on its 120th birthday. ET is not just the tower’s initials, it also means “and” in French, a.k.a. THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and there are other French connections in the theme.
• Patrick Berry‘s 3/15/09 New York Times crossword, “Prioresses”—Patrick adds a prior S to the beginning of both words in familiar phrases. Creamed corn, for example, becomes SCREAMED SCORN. Excellent cluing of theme entries.
• Trip Payne‘s 4/26/09 New York Times crossword, “Roughly Speaking”—The vocal dysfluencies UM and ER appear in rebus squares. D{UM}B AND D{UM}B{ER}{ER}, anyone?
• David J. Kahn‘s 1/11/09 New York Times crossword, “Making History”—An Obama inauguration theme in which 28 circled squares contain rebuses that are the 2-letter abbreviations of all the states Obama won in the 2008 presidential election. No, the states did not appear in geographically correct places, but it’s cool to see how many state abbreviations appear in A{ME}{RI}{CA}N {FL}AGS.

Most promising debut:

• David Chapus‘s 3/12/09 New York Times crossword, a Thursday puzzle with a PED XING rebus—each of the theme entries has a {PED} rebus square crossing another answer. COU{PE D}EVILLES and CA{PED} CRUSADER shone.

A wealth of gimmick puzzles:

• Brendan Quigley‘s 1/7/09 blog crossword, “Spoiler Alert!”—This one is cross-referenced in a crazy, meta way. If you don’t think you did this puzzle last year, hurry over to Brendan’s 1/7/09 post to experience this mind-bending crossword. The theme is brilliant and pushes the envelope for what crosswords can do.
• Matt Ginsberg‘s 5/17/09 New York Times second Sunday puzzle, “Takeaway”—Letters omitted in clues are also omitted in the answers, and the entries are also legitimate words. For example, [Sp*tted cats] are oCELoTS, to be entered in the grid as CELTS. [Biase*] clues ONESIE, which is ONE-SIdEd without the Ds. Brilliant conceit, challenging mental workout for the solver.
• Matt Gaffney‘s 12/11/09 Weekly Crossword Contest puzzle, “Flip Answer”—Nine clues can plausibly lead to two answers that are reversals of one another. The last letters of the “flipped answers” spell out MISDIRECT, the meta puzzle’s answer. [Word on the labels of some bottles of alcohol] clues both LAGER and REGAL, for example, and [They go in drawers] clues both SPOONS and SNOOPS. A tour de force and a huge challenge.
• Francis Heaney‘s 4/1/09 Onion A.V. Club crossword—The theme clues pull double duty by clueing two answers, but for one of each pair, you have to change the wording but pronounce the clue the same. For instance, [Type A people] are DOERS and the same clue could be “heard” as “Taipei people,” the TAIWANESE.
• Ben Tausig‘s 3/26/09 Ink Well puzzle, “Bad Strokes”—Twenty clues have adjacent-key typos. For example, [Hay people, more formally] clues HOMOSEXUALS, as the G and H keys are next to each other. I enjoyed this puzzle-within-a-puzzle.
• Dan Naddor‘s 1/9/09 Los Angeles Times crossword—Answers that cross a Battleship boat (e.g., AIRCRAFT CARRIER) are tagged “(h)” for hit. Answers that don’t cross a Battleship boat are “(m)” for miss. Who doesn’t like the game of Battleship, especially when combined with a crossword?
• Frank Longo‘s 1/2/09 Sun “Vowelless Crossword”—Frank’s got a whole book of these gnarly beasts, and I love the added challenge. [Alternative to a true-false test] is a MLTPL-CHC QZ when you strip out the vowels. Can you guess what CSNGSTR is? The clue is [Getting people up in arms].
• Mark Diehl‘s 2/27/09 Sun crossword, “Think Twice”—This double-edged rebus puts two letters in every single square around the grid’s perimeter. The top row packs three 8-letter answers—{CA}{RI}{BO}{US}, {TH}{E S}{CO}{RE}, and {MO}{NA} {LI}{SA}—into 12 squares.

Themeless puzzles:

• Brad Wilber‘s 7/25/09 Los Angeles Times crossword—LIZA WITH A “Z,” MALT LIQUOR, and ‘FRAID NOT are among the highlights in this fresh and Scrabbly puzzle.
• Will Nediger‘s 2/5/09 Sun crossword—SLACK-JAWED YOKEL meets WU-TANG CLAN in a puzzle jam-packed with exceptionally lively fill.
• Paula Gamache‘s 10/24/09 New York Times crossword—BLU-RAY DISC meets up with PETE SEEGER, TINA TURNER, and EDDIE MONEY.
• Matt Jones‘s 4/28/09 Jonesin’ crossword—Matt expanded the grid to 16×16 and has an 8×6 space in the center that’s completely devoid of black squares. When’s the last time you saw a sextuple-stack of 8- to 10-letter answers? The fill wasn’t my favorite, but that gigantic swath of white space is an impressive feat.
• Joon Pahk‘s 9/26/09 New York Times crossword—Tough puzzle with erudite fill and clever clues.

Toughest puzzle of the year:

• Stanley Newman‘s 1/3/09 Newsday “Saturday Stumper”—It took me about three times longer than most Saturday NYT puzzles. Killer clues.

Favorite puzzle books:

• Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon‘s collection, The Atlantic Cryptic Crosswords. Sure, the puzzles were all published previously in The Atlantic, but I hadn’t done them. The book was published in July and I finally finished it (mostly solving at bedtime) just recently. This is the main reason I slacked off on ACPT training with regular crosswords. These puzzles were just too damn interesting for me to put down. (New Hex cryptics now appear once every 4 weeks in the Wall Street Journal.)
• Patrick Berry‘s Puzzle Masterpieces. If you’ve been enjoying Patrick’s variety puzzles in the Wall Street Journal on Saturdays, you will love this book. If you haven’t, well, you should try the Saturday WSJ puzzles, and you should pick up a copy of this attractive hardcover book full of tough variety puzzles with much more interesting fill than standard crosswords have. This book is what occupied me for the post-ACPT months before the Hex cryptics book came out.

Constructors of the year:

• Elizabeth Gorski—She has a gift for merging crosswords and visual art. Nobody does it better. She’s also got a new blog, Crossword City, in which she riffs on common crossword fill (or new names that are likely to become common in crosswords) and shares new puzzles.
• Matt Gaffney—His Weekly Crossword Contest puzzles provide two challenges: a crossword (often hard) and a meta puzzle to figure out after finishing the crossword. He’s making crossword fans bend their brains in new ways each week. Head to Matt’s site and sign up to receive the puzzle each week. Don’t fret if you can’t figure out the meta every time—it stymies me sometimes too.
• Brendan Emmett Quigley—Via his blog, Brendan releases three crosswords a week, and he usually feeds people’s themeless hunger early in the week. In addition to his self-published blog puzzles, he also constructs for the Onion A.V. Club, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Visual Thesaurus, and assorted magazines, not to mention his many books (particularly the new Diagramless Crosswords).

It’s worth noting where my favorite puzzles were published. There were 10 in the NYT, 6 in other daily newspapers, 3 Sun puzzles released by Peter Gordon after the newspaper ceased publishing, 5 from alt-weekly papers, and 2 from constructors’ blogs. Five years ago, anyone’s list of favorite crosswords would likely have all come from daily newspapers, but now some haven’t even appeared in print anywhere. I suspect the balance will tip further away from the dailies in the coming years.

A hearty and heartfelt “Thank you!” to everyone who made or edited these puzzles. 2009 was another good year for crosswords, and we’re looking forward to more great works of cruciverbal art from all of you.