Summer Reading (without a Board)

Mark Weeks offers up two excellent annotated lists of "Chess Books to Read without a Board" (one for non-fiction and one for fiction) at his About.com:Chess site. I don't think I could improve much on his lists, though I found the absence of Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin in non-fiction rather puzzling. Perhaps he considered it too dated or too well-known to include, though it is still in print and better than the movie. And The Chess Players by Frances Parkinson Keyes is missing from fiction. It is a rather stilted and overly-fanciful historical romance about Paul Morphy, but it is fun to read in the right frame of mind (especially if you have a mind warped by years of graduate literary study), and I found it worth reading for the quotations at the head of each chapter alone. Jim West offers up a nicely balanced review at his blog. It does not seem to be in print but is worth looking for at a used book shop. I found my own copy one summer many years back at a little used book shop on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and remember reading it in the sun with my feet buried deep in the hot sand....

Bill Wall offers up a long list of "Fiction Literature and Chess" at his website for those seeking an even larger selection. However, having wasted an inordinate amount of time long ago tracking down and slogging through many fictional works about chess, I can assure you that Weeks has chosen only the best.

Hat tip to Scholastic Chess Gateway.