Chronology of chess books

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dannyhume

Thanks g, thats a few less books to worry about for the next 5-10 years.

NimzoRoy

Nimzovitch and Capablanca are never "outdated." If your current rating is accurate start out  with Capablanca's Chess Fundamentals and My Chess Career and of course my namesake's My System. I haven't read any books by Tarrasch but I bet anything by him would be worthwhile and so would most Chernev books such as Combinations: The Heart of Chess, Practical Chess Endings and The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played.

I also highly recommend Lasker's Common Sense in Chess, and a few endgame manual's such as Keres Practical Chess Endings, Chernev's PCE and Fine's classic Basic Chess Endings - for reference - think of it as an endgame "encyclopedia" in which you read various entries as needed but not the entire book from A-Z. Euwe & Hooper's A Guide to Chess Endings is also good. You definitely can't go wrong with game collections by and about Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine or other world champions either.

You can skip Kmoch's Pawn Power in Chess he makes up his own gobbledygook vocabulary and there are plenty of better written books around by Soltis, Pachman, Euwe, Fine, Kotov and others on the middlegame and positional play. However, if you already own Kmoch's book you could try reading it - I did eons ago and it was OK but not one of my favorites.

Don't worry about reading chess books in a particular order, you can mix up older classics by Capa, Nimzo and Lasker for instance with newer stuff by Pandolfini, Silman and other good modern writers. 

You'll have to be OK with descriptive notation to read a lot of the older chess books

Read on!

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