Originating as fan fiction from the brilliant imagination of Andy Weir, now brought to vivid life by Sarah Andersen, Cheshire Crossing is a funny, breakneck, boundlessly inventive journey through classic worlds as you’ve never seen them before. (That mystery is “ The Name of the Rose,” another big book full of fragments for a reader to assemble.) That was it for clues with titles, authors and characters, and these entries were enough for me to get a toehold in the passage and move forward to completion.In a one-of-a-kind graphic novel collaboration between the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian and the beloved illustrator behind Sarah’s Scribbles, Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy team up to save the multiverse, from Wonderland to Neverland and Oz. The “Novelist with a 1980 best-selling mystery set in a monastery” is UMBERTO ECO. Now I find the poems more emotionally moving as I skim each one with more life experience, but I’ll forget all about them in a day or two. I can’t recall whether I ever even tried to understand a single verse.

(Knowing these poems and their poets was gratifying to me as I solved these clues, but I memorized these names and titles under duress while preparing for A.P. I fared far less well with the “Indolent daydreamer of myth.” I needed a lot of crossing letters to come up with LOTUS EATER, but only because I thought of another poem, by Alfred Lord Tennyson before the mythological context of Homer’s Odyssey. It was luck, perhaps, or just more popular references: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “King of Kings” is OZYMANDIAS, and “I am the captain of my soul” is the last line of INVICTUS, by William Ernest Henley. That’s probably because the literary trivia in its clue set came rapidly to mind. This is Mark Halpin’s second acrostic for The New York Times, and it solved quite a bit more smoothly for me than the last one. Mitchell’s big books that are filled with puzzle pieces, like “Cloud Atlas” and “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” so it was fun to discover this more recent work through a different puzzle. ACROSTIC - Today’s passage, which comes from David Mitchell’s 2020 novel, “ Utopia Avenue,” is a brief, lyrical musing on the fragility of physical art and the importance of our collective cultural memory.

Cheshire crossing a graphic novel