Coincidentally, two books that I contributed to (in a very very small way) have either just appeared or are about to appear. The first of them is Improve Your Chess at Any Age by Andy Hortillosa, published by Everyman Chess, which is an elaboration of the anti-blundering system that he wrote about in his column at www.chessville.com. As Andy reminded me in a comment here a few days ago, the title of the book was actually my suggestion! I want to congratulate him on seeing the book through to completion and getting it published. Lots of people say they want to write books (me included), but saying and doing are two completely different things.
I haven’t read Andy’s book yet, so there’s not that much more I can say about it at present, but I look forward to getting it.
The other forthcoming book is Daniel Naroditsky’s Mastering Positional Chess, published by New in Chess. The publication date is March 2010, but of course you can pre-order it at Amazon.com. I cannot give an objective review of Daniel’s book in this blog, because I was invited to read and comment on it when it was in the manuscript stage. I do not know how many of my edits and comments made it into the final draft, but I do know that Daniel listened to them carefully. What I can tell you, for certain, is that if you read it you will be blown away by the fact that a 13-year-old could write such a book.
Andy Soltis has a great article in the February issue of Chess Life, which I received just today, called “The Ups and Downs of Annotating.” He says that there are two main styles of annotation, which he calls “writing up” and “writing down.” The first style is to put in lots of technical analysis. The author is writing up to an audience of very strong players — probably the peers that he wants to impress. The second style is to distill things down to basics, at the risk of possibly making them seem simpler than they really are.
Soltis makes this interesting comment: “Up and coming players tend to write… well, up — often at least 100 rating points above their playing strength.” This comment is particularly relevant to Danya’s book. My contribution to the book (if I made any contribution at all) was to try to persuade Daniel to ease up on the throttle and make his annotations a little bit simpler. It will be interesting to see if he took my advice. But whether he did or not, I guarantee that his book will be worthy of study.
