Be candid about your chess books.

@Noflaps

I'd say don't worry about it Noflaps. I think every commenter here will admit it's hard to finish a chess book. I've finished a few and not finished quite a few. (think 10:1 but I'm quite satisfied with that)

As long as you keep picking up the book and making it through one more page or one more annotated game you'll be progressing your chess studies. Isn't that all we're trying to do.

@SixtySecondsOfHell: good for you. I wish I could accomplish as much. But "if wishes were horses...", as my mother used to say.

One book that I have been playing with ("working on" is just flat out the wrong phrase) is John Watson's Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy. Yeah, I know. any book with the word "secrets" in the title needs a new title. I digress. It is arguably my favourite bathroom book, and has been since I bought it, nearly a quarter century ago. Yes, I would no doubt gain much more from the book if I were to actually sit down with it for an hour or more each day and go through it carefully. but it is just so easy to use it as a bed-time book or bathroom book! I love to sit flip through the book, find a page I have bookmarked for further consideration, and work on one of the many examples he uses. Even though I'm just going through it in my head, just any one example gives me quite a lot to think about. (My family complains vociferously about the time I spend in there. Especially my teenage daughter)

@Noflaps said in #1:
> Have you ever read an entire chess book and played through all its
> games? ... By "finished" I carefully mean: read every single word
> AND actually played through, thoughtfully, every included game. ...
I do not know if my reading would be considered by you to have been done "thoughtfully", but, apart from that, I would feel safe in claiming to have completely read How to Win in the Chess Openings by Horowitz, Modern Ideas in the Chess Openings by Horowitz, Winning Chess Openings by Reinfeld, How to Think Ahead in Chess by Horowitz and Reinfeld, How Not to Play Chess by Znosko-Borovsky, and Logical Chess by Chernev. By the way, that last book does not seem to me to have the same purpose as any book by Nimzowitsch.

Not sure, say 30-50.

Including such tomes like Dvoretzky‘s endgame manual.

@Noflaps said in #1:
> By "finished" I carefully mean: read every single word AND actually played through, thoughtfully, every included game. Every. Game.

So if you'd really like to play through a serious, heavily annotated, game collection move by move on an actual, wooden chessboard, then that's a tough call indeed. But that's not the only way to read a chess book, and it's not the only type of chess book. You wouldn't have to go through such hassle to finish the Polgar/Truong tactics primer that was mentioned - after all, it's mostly just a bunch of diagrams. Then there are marvelously written books where the annotated games are not much more than an afterthought - Simon Webb's "Chess for Tigers" being one that I loved back in the day. A third option is to read a book that DOES contain complete games and relatively few diagrams but to follow along comfortably on a computer screen because there is a .pgn file available. I used to read the print edition of Silman's "How to Reassess your Chess", 3rd edition, from cover to cover like that.

So maybe the problem is that you make it too hard for yourself. But clearly, in an era of continuous distractions, your problem is everybody's problem. There's a Youtube video where none other than Peter Svidler reveals that he hasn't read a chess book in 20 years "while tragically, when you look at the book market, it seems that we live in a golden age of chess books."

Yes many and slowly (at about 30in to 1 hour per game) but not nearly as many as I have bought and hope to study one day.

I own 8 chess books. One of them I wrote myself. I've read them all multiple times. Here are the 7 I bought:

Pawn Power - Kmoch
Art of Attack - Vukovic
Funamental Chess Endings - Muller/Lamprecht
Pawn Structure Chess - Soltis
A group of games annotated by Irving Chernev that I can't remember the title.
The Sveshnikov Sicilian - Yakovic
Anti Sicilians - Rogozenko

I've read a couple more that I don't own (I used to visit the library and check out all their chess books), but that's pretty much it ;).

I've found that a chess book - in prime placement on a visible book shelf - can raise your perceived IQ when visitors stop in. So even if you don't read them, they have a good use! Don't put out too many though, or you might be labeled as obsessed.

www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013

Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them

Of course. I've probably read a few hundred by now (and yes, in that nitpicky way you define "reading"!). I've even made annotations in some of them. Copious blocks in pencil. None of which turned me into Carlsen...but I had fun. :)

I have read some of Jacob Aagaard's chess books, excelling at chess and one from the grandmaster preparation series, I have to tell you...this was my first chess book and I hated it at first ( it seems that I am not the only one to have had this reaction, if I remember correctly, aagaard said than a reader had hated it at the start before liking the book) at that time, I said to myself: (after my first reading in full), why is there such professional psychology explained for just a board game!? and all these explanations on tournaments, and these monstrous and complex variants... then I read the whole book several times and chapter by chapter and I replayed the games that were in the book on a wooden chessboard and I tried to take what was useful to me. I finally finished this block of granite and it sculpted my mind, my mind went from disorder to order. I LOVED the book and i bought another one. because I understood that I could go from a simple board game to a sport, that I had to play tournaments even if it's exclusively on lichess and not on Over the board, that I have to be critical, humble, that I have to learn and that there will necessarily be defeats and victories. I knew it was a long road but I'm happy to tell you that even though I still don't 100% agree with Aagard's point of view, I'm happy and I've learned, I've learned this what a pleasure it is to play and understand chess! Thank you Mr Aagard for your work and your books and thank you to all chess authors!