I own a large library of chess books and thought I'd post a few recommendations since we have a lot of new members to the GWJ group. Feel free to throw your own favorites in here as well.

Game Collections

My 60 Memorable Games - Bobby Fischer

Now that the crazy genius is dead, we finally get a new edition of his great collection of games.

Logical Chess Move by Move - Irving Chernev

A longtime classic. Following a series of games, Chernev describes the ideas behind every move. Great for beginners and one of the first chess books I ever read. John Nunn (another exceptional chess writer) wrote an updated version of this approach using modern games

The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal - Mikhail Tal

A classic collection by the most brilliant tactical player in chess history. He has a great writing style and the games contain some of the most head-spinning moves and ideas ever played on the board. One of my top 5 chess books.

Capablanca's 100 Best Games - Golombek

A collection of games by one of the game's greatest natural players. Jose Capablanca was world champion from 1921-1927. He had a classical style that was completely logical and seemed effortless. Also one of the great endgame players in history.

Manuals

The Amateur's Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery - Jeremy Silman

A great book for when you have played chess for a while and know some basics, but don't know how to really start thinking and understand the game. Silman is one of the best chess instructional writers for amateurs.

Silman's Complete Endgame Course - Jeremy Silman

The only endgame book you need to read.

How to Reassess Your Chess- The Complete Chess Mastery Course - Jeremy Silman

Only read this after you have read the first two Silman books, and you understand basic tactics and some openings. This book puts the pieces together.

Speaking of tactics...

Winning Chess Tactics - Yasser Seirawan

The ABC's of tactics. Read this then do a few thousand tactics puzzles on the Chess.com Tactics Trainer. Tactics are going to take you farther at the amateur level than any other skill. Do 30 minutes of puzzles a day and your game will improve. Any of Seirawan's 'Winning...' series of books are worthwhile reading. He is an excellent writer.

There are lots of great manuals on chess strategy. Many are very advanced and specialized. Some good ones include:

Art of the Middlegame - Keres and Kotov

Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy - John Watson

Middlegame Book 1: Static Features - Euwe & Kramer

Middlegame Book 2: Dynamic & Subjective Features - Euwe & Kramer

Chess Strategy for Club Players - Herman Grooten

This is a new book and I have not read it yet, but it has won some book of the year awards for 2009.

Studying master games and following on a board while doing your own analysis is probably the best single way to learn chess strategy. As a bonus, you get to understand the history and beautiful ideas of the game. If you wanted to be a writer, you would read the great classics. This is the same principle. The key is to read well annotated collections. You want lots of words and descriptions of the strategic ideas and thinking process. The collections at the beginning of this post are good starting places. Other great writers and annotators include, John Nunn, Garry Kasparov, David Bronstein, Alexander Alekhine, and Fred Reinfeld. Some of my favorite collections are tournament books. Following the games of a group of masters in a single tournament is extremely instructive. David Bronsten's book from the Zurich 1953 tournament is probably my favorite. (Bronstein was one of the strongest players never to be world champion.) Follow along and try and choose the move of the protagonist you are reading. If you were wrong, why is his move better? What is his idea or plan? Asking these kinds of questions and doing your own analysis will improve your game faster than any kind of study.

Most importantly: ANALYZE YOUR OWN GAMES. I cannot stress this more. Learning from your own games is going to help you more than any single thing you can do in your chess career. If you lost, try and figure out why. Sometimes it is an obvious tactical mistake or blunder. As you improve (see tactics above) you will blunder less and it will be less obvious why you lost. Then you need to get out a pencil and paper and work out different lines and ideas. By doing this, your understanding will increase significantly. If you need help or can't see where you went wrong, get a better player to analyze with you. Remember: You learn more from chess by losing than winning, but only if you ANALYZE YOUR OWN GAMES.

Openings

I have not mentioned openings as this is probably the least important part of the game for non-master/high level club players. That said, it is good to get a basic understanding of opening ideas. Don't spend lot of time memorizing lines until you are up above 1900-2000. A good new book that discusses openings at just the right detail level for non-masters is Fundamental Chess Openings - P. Van Der Sterren. It fills a nice gap between a basic intro to openings and a hardcore 300 page manual on a single line.

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