The Complete Kennections: 5,000 Questions in 1,000 Puzzles

This entertaining and stimulating brain teaser from Jeopardy! host Jennings (100 Places to See After You Die) is based on his popular online game series of the same name. “Kennections” began in 2012 when Jennings—then a record-setting game show contestant—was approached by Parade magazine about authoring a weekly puzzle in which the player would answer five trivia questions and then detect the commonality between the answers. (Parade initially suggested something far more complicated but unprintable in its allotted space; Jennings, ever the master puzzler, solved this problem by streamlining it into its current form.) A hit in print became a hit online when Jennings moved the puzzle series from Parade to the website Mental Floss. The thousand puzzles collected here are not organized by theme, preventing the player from cherry picking categories in their comfort zone, and trying to beat them quickly becomes addictive. “Being a trivia person breaks your brain,” Jennings writes, but if his brain is broken, it does not show. Viewers of Jeopardy! won’t be surprised by the humor here: the introduction is titled “Kenfessions,” the instructions are “Kenstructions,” and the people he thanks in the acknowledgements are “Kentributors.” Jennings is having a lot of fun with this, and it’s infectious. (July)