Xiao Qiang Returns from Fill-in-the-Blanks

Author: Wang Ergang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-08-01
Features: "Xiao Qiang's Crossword Returns" and "Xiao Qiang's Crossword" are quite similar. The appeal of both books still lies in the actual crossword puzzles. I hope crossword puzzles are a timeless form of entertainment—so long as the combinations of Chinese characters don’t undergo fundamental changes, they can act like black holes, absorbing all kinds of (random and diverse) knowledge and information from the world. We constantly receive these things, either actively or passively, and a large portion of them seem to have no practical use after we learn and understand them, unless you engage in crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles are a tool that connects information and brings joy from it. The author of "Xiao Qiang's Crossword Returns" is still me. In fact, during the gap between the publication of the two books, my own situation also changed—I left the Southern Weekly newspaper and no longer edited the column section of the paper, but I still oversaw the "Xiao Qiang's Crossword" column on the page. "Xiao Qiang's Crossword Returns" collects some of the crossword puzzles I created during the later stages of my work at Southern Weekly, as well as those I compiled as an author for the newspaper after leaving it, and some others I created for other publications. However, "Xiao Qiang's Crossword Returns" is just a sibling to "Xiao Qiang's Crossword," not a twin. There are still some differences between them. While compiling "Xiao Qiang's Crossword Returns," I tried hard not to repeat any clues I had used before, but later gave in to the difficulty and lowered the standard, hoping only to avoid self-repetition. If a few clues from "Xiao Qiang's Crossword" slipped in, I had to turn a blind eye to it.