LEGO: For the Child in All of Us

Are you a LEGO fan? Those ubiquitous toy bricks have found their way into the library system! You can search the catalog using the word "Lego" to find all varieties of goodies, but we've also rounded up a list of some of the latest titles below.

We have books!

For Children

Dolphin Rescue adapted by Tracey West

LEGO Star Wars: The Dark Side by Daniel Lipkowitz

Robot Rampage by Greg Farshtey

Tribes of Chima by Ruth Amos

Build Your Own Galaxy: The Big Unofficial Lego Builder's Book by Joachim Klang, Oliver Albrecht, Lutz Uhlmann, Tim Bischoff

The LEGO Ideas Book: Unlock Your Imagination by Daniel Lipkowitz 

The LEGO Book by Daniel Lipkowitz
 
For Adults 

Brick City: Global Icons to Make from Lego by Warren Elsmore

LEGO Build-It Book: Volume 1 - Amazing Vehicles by Nathanael Kuipers, Mattia Zamboni [also an eBook]

Beautiful LEGO by Mike Doyle

The Cult of LEGO by John Baichtal, Joe Meno 

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David C. Robertson with Bill Breen

Make: Lego and Arduino Projects by John Baichtal, Matthew Beckler & Adam Wolf 
 

We have DVDs!

Lego - Ninjago and Friends

The Lego Movie

Lego Batman the Movie: DC Super Heroes Unite

Star Wars Lego: The Empire Strikes Out  

Legends of CHIMA: The Lion, the Crocodile and the Power of Chi 



We have items in Spanish for kids!  

Las Leyendas De Chima: Comienza la leyenda by Trey King

¡A reparar ese camión! by Michael Anthony Steele

Los discos de poder by Greg Farshtey


And, last but certainly not least, if you got kids who'd like to get their hands on some bricks, our library system has 9 LEGO Clubs! Visit our Library LEGO Club page to find one near you! Age ranges vary (6-12, 2-14, 5+), so check with individual libraries for clarification.


Links

Bricks and Minifigs Albuquerque

Lego Is for Girls [Businessweek]

National Puzzle Day

In honor of National Puzzle Day (January 26), Cherry Hills Library hosted a crossword puzzle tournament on January 14!

Puzzles were taken from the New York Times Archives and the fastest correct completer from each round moved on to the finals.

Congrats to Jennifer and Jason, our stellar final round contestants.  Below you can see them locked in a dead heat for the grand prize:

Both their puzzles were correct, but Jason came in a hair before Jennifer to claim the title.

Here's a close up of the winning puzzle.

Many thanks to all who participated!

The Library has books on puzzles, as well as novels featuring puzzles and movies.
For a fun cinematic look into crossword culture, there's Wordplay.

There are several Crossword Puzzle Dictionaries available for check out, including:
Crossword Puzzle Dictionary
The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary
The Everything Large-Print Crossword Dictionary

Nero Blanc and Parnell Hall are two mystery authors who feature crosswords.
The first of Nero Blanc's Belle Graham series is The Crossword Murder.
Parnell Hall's first in the series is A Clue For The Puzzle Lady (also available electronically).

If you're looking for puzzle books, but not necessarily crosswords, we have:
Sudoku Easy To Hard
Sudoku 200 Fun and Challenging Japanese Number Puzzles
The Sudoku Book

Mystery authors who feature Sudoku include Kaye Morgan, Parnell Hall and Shelley Freydont.  Some of their series begin:
Murder By Sudoku
The Sudoku Puzzle Murder (a continuation of her crossword puzzle series)
The Sudoku Murder

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is in the beginning of March and information can be found on their website.

Literary Games

Brrr!  It's been cold outside, and maybe you are looking to have some fun with friends indoors for a change, but are tired of all your video games and board games.  Why not try some old school games with a literary bent?  Put your heads together for a selection of fun literary games you can play to while away the time!

Write your own 6-word memoir!

Use Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (edited by Larry Smith) as a memoir creation guide!  Will your memoir sound more like Chuck Klosterman's "Nobody cared, then they did. Why?" or Amy Sedaris' more obscure ""Mushrooms. Clowns. Wands. Five. Wig. Thatched"?

Play Book Title Hangman!

The website MysterySceneMag.com has their own book title hangman ready for you to play, or use Hopscotch, Hangman, Hot-Potato, and Ha, Ha, Ha: A Rule Book of Childhood's Games by Jack Maguire to start your own game if you've forgotten the rules.


Be a 140 Character Author!

The TwitterFiction Fest was last October, but if you want to hone your tweeting skills, try writing a story in 140 characters.  The book The Arrow Finds Its Mark: A Book of Found Poems, edited by Georgia Heard, has some poems created from words found in Twitter feeds, and you can also take a look at Historical Tweets: The Completely Unabridged and Ridiculously Brief History of the World by Alan Beard and Alec McNayr for more ideas.

Be a Book Spine Poet!

What kind of poetry can you make from book spines?  Check out these entries from last year's LibraryThing contest!  So easy, but such entertaining results!

Book spine poetry by abcreads

Adapt other classic games to literary purposes! Search for books about classic games using the subject "Games - Rules".
 
Just-for-fun links

10 Literary Board Games for Book Nerds

What's Scrabble When You Can Play Novelist?

Notable Novelist: A Card Game for Book Lovers

LitLovers' Games and Icebreakers for book clubs!

For the Love of the Crossword Puzzle

As a fervent lover of crossword puzzles, Scrabble and any kind of word game, I had no idea how the crossword puzzle started until I checked the internet to see what happened on this day in history. The first crossword puzzle was actually called a "Word-Cross" and was invented by an English editor and puzzle constructor named Arthur Wynne. Mr. Wynne moved to the United States and settled in Cedar Grove, New Jersey and went to work for the New York World.
He was asked to invent a new game for the paper and based on a game he played as a child called "Magic Squares" he came up with the "Word-Cross". The first crossword puzzles were diamond-shaped with no black squares! Eventually they were called a Cross-Word puzzle and then became known as crossword which we all know and love today. There are even different variants of the crossword puzzle in other countries. Britain uses a lattice-like structure with more shaded squares, the Japanese style grid has two additional rules which the shaded cells may not share a side and the corner squares must be white and the Swedish grid would be a high challenge for a lot of American users as they don't use grid numbers. The clues are put into the actual puzzle itself and arrows are used to indicate which direction to put the answer.

There are a couple of mystery writers who have even tied the crossword puzzle into their novels. There is a Clue for the Puzzle Lady and Dead Man's Puzzle by Parnell Hall. Nero Blanc has several titles such as Death on the Diagonal, Anatomy of a Crossword and Wrapped up in Crosswords. If you are new to crossword puzzles or cannot remember that three-letter word for a Yale student, (it's "eli"), you could try a crossword puzzle dictionary. The two best ones in the library are The Crossword Puzzle Dictionary by Andrew Swanfeldt or The New York Times Crossworld Puzzle Dictionary by Tom Pulliam and Clare Grundman. The New York Times Dictionary is an older edition, but sufficient for someone starting out solving crosswords. There is a great documentary in the catalog called WordPlay which showcases New York Times puzzle enthusiasts and participants in the 28th Annual American Crossword Tournament.

Now, if you are so inclined to make your own crossword puzzle you could check out The Complete Cruciverbalist: How to Solve and Compose Crossword Puzzles for Fun and Profit by Stan Kurzban and Mel Rosen or read about one man's journey with crossword puzzles called
Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession by Marc Romano.

If you also like the crossword game "Scrabble" there is a great digital video in our collection called Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Game Circuit or you could read Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obssession in the World of Competitive Scrabble. We also have the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary or the Everything Scrabble if you are so inclined to look up and possibly memorize certain words to be ready for your next Scrabble game, but we all know you don't really need to do that, because after all you are a whiz at getting those triple letter and triple word scores, right?