2 good chess books I can confidently recommend

1. Zurich 1953 International Chess Tournament by Bronstein-->Excellent book and notes to the moves

2.Pawn Structure Chess by Soltis-->Good for recognizing pawn structures and which breaks to aim for.

Comments? Are these not good chess books?

I personally think an excellent place to start is the approved list for training by FIDE:

http://trainers.fide.com/recommended-books.html

Many of the books you would expect are there such as various by Aagaard, Dvoretsky, Yusupov, Kasparov, Silman, etc.

The Soltis you mentioned is there. I'm somewhat surprised the Zurich 53 tournament book is not. But not many tournament books are.

Personally, I have been going through Yusupov and highly recommend his series. I've gone through Silman's Amateur Mind and recommend that.  I also recommend his Endgame book for some light reading at the beach. The Zurich 53 book you mentioned I have looked at in the past and is excellent.

Unfortunately I do not have MS Excel so cannot view the list. But I agree with the Yusupov suggestion. However, I have a problem with these exercises kind of books. a very strong player once recommended to me that doing exercises is good but going through entire games is better. Maybe he is right or wrong i do not know. But yes, the Yusupov series is recognized as a good book and I have definitely learned a thing or two from it.

Get yourself a free copy of LibreOffice. It is excellent and then you can open the spreadsheet.

I wondered whether the Bronstein book was even in print. It is. The copy I have is quite old and actually has a different title than the modern printing.

I found Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953 on Amazon new and at a decent price. I believe it's in English Descriptive notation so be prepared to convert P-K4 to e4.

Bronstein's book is number 26 on the May 2018 list.

By the way, thank you for the link. The list is fascinating and I didn't realize before that it existed.

You're right! I just missed it when I looked through the list.

In the .xls-file called 'Chess Books & DVDs in English' updated 23 May 2018 by Jovan Petronic, there is a separate column called 'Level'. Some books have the level 'K', others have the level 'PNLRQK' and so on. Does anyone know what the different levels designate?

Mastering the Chess Openings vol 1-4 by John Watson is on the 2018 list, but those are quite general and focus on understanding the ideas.

"Chess For Tigers" by Simon Webb, fun read with good practical advice for the tournament player. "Planning" by Neil Mcdonald, does a great job of teaching how to find good middlegame plans.

I was wondering the same thing. The letters appear to be the first letters of the chess pieces in English, except L, which would be B (bishop) in English but is L (Läufer) in German. My guess is that it's an estimate of what playing levels the book is most useful for, using a progression where P is a relative novice, Q is candidate master, K is master, and N, L, and R represent levels in between.

Anyone who knows the answer to this, please let us know.

I was thinking the same, but I find it strange that all game collections have the level 'K'. Is the study of collections like Zurich 53 reserved for masters?

  This is what I get when I try to open it too;                                                                                          

I just sent you an email with a pdf file. Couldn't figure out how to convert it to a text file, as I am technologically challenged.

Thanks Mike......you can't be THAT challenged since you managed to get it open in some form.

Ahhh, but there was a menu choice for pdf. Easily clicked. I would have had to think beyond my poor abilities to do any other conversion. 

Both are excellent. I would have ranked Kmoch's Pawn Power in Chess as slightly better than the Soltis book, though.

Other good books include Tal's book on the 1960 match with Botvinnik and Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games.