Originally posted by Mad Rook It wasn't really a correction, I was just relaying Silman's opinion on the best reading order. What does Silman know, anyway? 😉
I've noticed a lot of books starting with "The Art of..." tend to get high marks from chess people (e.g., The Art of Attack, The Art of the Checkmate, etc.). I'm surprised that more chess book authors don't use titles along that line. (The Art of [fill in the blank]). 😀
Yeah, Winter's article is why I got the Cadogan edition instead of the McKay (Defirmian) edition. I don't worry as much about minor typos as Winter does, but sometimes he tips us off to major deficiencies.
I have an addition of the Art of War which is edited by James Clavell. It is short and to the point. I like chess books that explain moves in more abstract terms rather than listing off long lines of play, and when I'm tired of reading chess books I find this 80-90 page inspires my play on the board.
When I see a move in a game or from a book I can relate it to a passage from this book, and to some extent I guess it works the other way too.
Originally posted by Mad Rook Yeah, Winter's article is why I got the Cadogan edition instead of the McKay (Defirmian) edition. I don't worry as much about minor typos as Winter does, but sometimes he tips us off to major deficiencies.
Minor typos can be bad when there are several on every page, as in Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters Changed the Game of Chess by Susan Polgar with Paul Truong.
I think that the book that single-handed improved my results is "The Seven Deadly Chess Sins" by Jonathan Rowson. Not only is it HUGELY entertaining book about chess psychology, but I would say that it's one of those very rare books that you can read through without a chessboard and learn a lot from just by reading the texts (and let's face it, don't we all usually skip through our chessbooks!!). It deals with the mistakes that we (as players) bring to the chessboard, giving different ways of thinking about things and and how to improve the chess-playing person rather than only talk about chess moves. Sheer pleasure...! (The seven deadly sins are things like Egoism, Wanting, Perfectionism, Blinking, Materialism etc etc... (it's especially attractive if you also happen to be interested in (in no particular order ;-)...taoism, quantum physics, paradox...).
Now that I've thought about it a little, I'd have to put Bronstein's book about the Zurich tournament as one of my favorites, along with Tal's book on his world championship match with Botvinnik in 1960..
I recently bought Paul Morphy: A Modern Perspective by V. Beim.
I'm very impressed with both the thoroughness of the notations & also the way that Beim has isolated key features of Morphy's play & how these changed & developed over his brief career.
17 Nov '07 23:21
Favourite chess book?
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