Yay, I'm the lucky owner of a copy of The life and games of Michail Tal. I won it as a prize when playing a little tournament at our chess club. I didn't have the chance to read it yet though, except for the first 10 pages or so. But now spring break in coming soon, I'm gonna catch up on my reading.

Hi Zatoichi,

sorry, I forgot to feedback earlier... your list contains some great works I've read, and some great works (I suspect) that I haven't read.

These book lists are like movies hey! You set out to name a top 10 and are still going at 50... I have this one for this mood, this one for this memory, and so on and so on.

is the "The life and games of Mikhail Tal" written by Tal himself?

Oops, my mistake. I own a copy of The Magic of Mikhail Tal, not The life and games of Mikhail Tal. The Magic of Mikhail Tal is written by Joe Gallagher and published by Everyman Chess.
The Life & Games of Mikhail Tal is written by Tal himself, as you can see on Amazon.com.

Along the lines of Suba's book is Dynamic Chess by R.N. Coles. Unfortunately like Suba's book, this book is out of print.

Some outstanding books are currently out of print. Books by Lev Polugaevsky-in particular Sicilian Love, Grandmaster Preparation and Grandmaster Performance are lamentable in that all three are out of print. Alexander Kotov's Grandmaster at Work are also out of print.

These books fill a need for master games that are accessable to A and B players.

I have Sicilian Love and Grandmaster Preparation.

Sicilian Love is a great book... I wrote a post about it just a few weeks back.

Amazingly, I also wrote about Grandmaster Preparation back in April, calling it the first ever chess blog.

We must be on the same wavelength!

Another "And because" book: "The adventures of Chessman", a comic booklet by John Watson on the adventures of a chess player in Transilvania. Hilarious

At the risk of upsetting the copyright police... we should get that one scanned!

Hehe, yeah, certainly the "out of print" books. It's gonna be nearly impossible to find those second hand somewhere.

A dutch chess puzzle book called "Man en Paard" from Robert Timmer is also imo a must-have book. Unfortunately it also dates from 1994 and I haven't seen it in any store yet. If you find it, don't hesitate, but buy it! (It's in dutch, but the puzzles are real beauties)