Title: Naughty Crosswords Author: Nerve Publisher: Chronicle Books Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 127 Genres:: Humor,Reviewer: Chris R. Morgan

Rating:

There is most likely a feeling of intense malaise when thinking of the crossword puzzle. Most people would conjure up the image of a sunny Saturday morning when your dad finds an hour or so of suburban happiness by doing the crossword in his weekend supplement, sipping black coffee and wearing his decades-old bathrobe like the proud, indulgent homeowner that he is. There was also the hope of the children that they would never become that. There’s plenty of time to do crosswords when you're dead, or buying time in rehab.

Leave it to the staff of Nerve.com to put out something that's simultaneously tasteful and salaciously dirty. On the one hand, you have the stellar design with aesthetically modern fonts, elaborate packaging and pixilated images of sexual positions, some of which look damn-near impossible to perform by carbon-based species. On the other hand this book, as its title so strongly implies, is full of scandalous crosswords filled with all sorts of references to the romantic and coital arts.

It's quite amazing that they could even think to make 50 puzzles out of this premise; they nearly pull it off, too. Of course being that it's Nerve, they go above and beyond to link sex to every layer and branch off of human culture, history, science and so on. Some answers have less to do with sex than they have to do with being amusing and hard to find on a New York Times crossword. For all his talents, I'm sure Will Shortz would never, in his right mind, make a puzzle answer out of "assfuck." Now the makers of the book admit that not everything in the puzzles is related to sex. When you think about it, it makes sense since to make 50 perverted crosswords would be impossible and repetitive. Of the ones I was able to complete, some of the same answers popped up from other puzzles.

Doing a sexual crossword won't be a trivia-based equivalent to self-gratification; rather, it is an amusing and brain-livening activity that one might partake in during a lunch break for a certainly not amusing and brain-numbing job. However, these are also done at various skill levels, and when you're without, say, Wikipedia or Google, you might find yourself sneaking peaks at the answers in the back for the less sexual or pop culture-derived. All in all, it's worth a good deal of anyone's free time, if that concept still exists. And who'd ever think of saying, "Honey, what's a three-letter word for a sound made by someone receiving oral sex?"