How many chess books have you read?

How do you know if they are a useful learning tool or not if you have read none ?  

Aah don't cotton to none a'this new-fangled fancy book learnin' no how : )

two.

I have many books -- a few hundred. Have read only a handful entirely, but have browsed many extensively and quite a few repeatedly over the years.

The ones that most impacted me were Capablanca's "Chess Fundamentals" -- a very good first book to read, Fischer's <you know>, Kotov's <you know>, and Wetzell's "Chess Master at Any Age." Never got very far with "My System", but love many other chess books. Agree with the earlier poster who stated that we live in good times. :)

Reading through the text: many. Playing through every game: a few. Playing through or clearly visualising every variation in the annotations: none.

Because chess, as far as I learn, is an integrative game which encompasses the aspect of "learning" far broader then sentences you read to help you along.  When its not the literary part that needs work, its your parietal lobe in combination with strong spatial manipulative skills.  

For example, a big deal when I wanted to be good was not actually playing the game itself, but rather remembering the movements of specific pieces in particular lines over and over.  The lines themselves are less important in this case, but the idea is you're mentally working out your spacial memory to handle a larger capacity.   Even since I started doing math problems again I actually got a little better in chess since it works ouf "if/then" focus of the game.  

People who are good at geometry have a natural tendecie to do better at chess as well, and not surprisingly so.   I believe it was Emanuel Lasker or someone else, as a few other Chess GM's that came from the mathematics field.  

I tried reading chess books but couldnt get passed the end and I was frustrated at the medium.  Honestly I wish chess books could help me out, but I find memory and brain game puzzles, in addition to eating healthy and exercising a bit superior than studying a book in my case.  

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Yeah, what would have happened if Bobby Fischer had wasted his time on reading a bunch of books on chess. Books are a passing fad which will never catch on...no, wait : )

you're totally off the mark on bobby fischer. fischer read probably more books than anyone else. there's this story about when he messed up a pawn ending. he read tons of books on pawn endings right after that and never messed up another one.

i think you may be confusing with capablanca who claimed he never read a book. but that contradicts what he said about how he studied probably 5000 rook endgames on his own.

pdve, you don't get sarcasm do you? I'm perfectly aware of how much chess literature Fischer consumed and retained. I was trying to use humor to illustrate a point. Cheers, John C.

I read only some parts of the books that I mentioned and not the whole books.

The only book I ever finished is Chess for Dummies 2nd edition, I've read others but never finished them.

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In India chess books are "ENDANGERED".

I've gone through fragments of about 10 books. What has helped me more than any book is simply tactics trainer on chess.com. Also reviewing games in a database.

While I'm sure books can be greatly helpful (if you are patient and dilligent enough) -- there are many other methods of learning chess, especially nowadays with computers.

I have pretty much given up on chess books, and I feel happier for it.

:)

When I buy a chess book, I usually spend a few hours going through most of the text and a few sample variations. At last count (five years ago), the number of chess books on my shelves exceeded 200.

Reading every bit of a chess book cover-to-cover is another matter, and I can point only to really old books that I read in Google Books format for which I can make this claim (see http://chessskill.blogspot.com/2013/05/gioachino-greco-on-game-of-chess.html). However, in the next couple of days I may finish a book that I first read in part in the 1970s: http://chessskill.blogspot.com/2013/01/logical-chess-book-review.html. I have been reading every word and playing through every annotation. First, however, I study an unannotated copy of each game. After drawing my own conclusions, I read what Chernev has to say. I have also started this process with another chess book that I expect to finish in 2013. 

Ditto.