DONT GET CHECKMATED august 2025

>CurrierBell was planning to do this month but he has been hospitized so will not be able to lead this topic. I volunteered to help. but am hoping he is able to get well soon and be able to participate! His intro is below; Any typos and other mistakes are entirely my own

"I just thought of a good theme that I don't think we've done in quite a while, if ever. (Or have we?) Something about board games and card games – be they fiction, historical, or even just books about how to play the games or game strategy itself. I thought I'd call it Don't Let Yourself Get Checkmated!The most obvious titles that pop to my own mind are Through the Looking Glass, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and The Chessmen of Mars. Most of us have read at least the first two, though maybe not the Edgar Rice Burroughs. But for more advanced Alice reading, I've had Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice around forever, have never gotten to it, but really do want to.

And for those like myself who want to incorporate a Great Courses Plus subscription into their reading, there are How to Play Chess: Lessons from an International Master, Great Board Games of the Ancient World, and The Mathematics of Games and Puzzles: From Cards to Sudoku (this last expanding beyond cards and board games to include topics like Sudoku and Rubik's Cube).

I think I'll exclude computer games. Nothing against them, mind you, but they may get us too far afield into cyberpunk ... Matrix ... a whole plethora of other topics and genres. Somebody else may want to consider this as a monthly topic, though.

And I'm going to exclude physical contests – sports, athletics, that kind of thing. Some great works out there (Malamud's The Natural comes first to mind, and also of course parts of Homer and Virgil) and plenty of history; but again, it's getting too far afield, though someone else might also want to consider this topic."

below are books from Good reads. Do you know any others?

Jumanji
by Chris Van Allsburg

It's All a Game: A Short History of Board Games
by Tristan Donovan (Goodreads Author)

The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit
by Philip E. Orbanes

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game
by Mary Pilon

The Game of the Goose

Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations
by Robert Charles Bell

A Game of Birds and Wolves:... A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II

Ancient Board Games

Perfect Nonsense: Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson
by George Carlson

Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games
by Fernand Gobet


My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles: The Amazing True Story of One Boy’s Journey from Refugee to Chess Champion
by Tanitoluwa Adewumiars

A History Of Chess
by H.J.R. Murray

Fischer / Spassky:The New York Times report on the chess match of the century
by Richard Roberts

A History of Board-Games Ot... A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess
by H.J.R. Murray

Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them

The Backgammon Book
by Oswald Jacoby

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players
by Stefan Fatsis

The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games
by Margaret Hofer

The Crossword Century: 100 Years of Witty Wordplay, Ingenious Puzzles, and Linguistic Mischief

Thanks, Cindy! I want to read one of your suggestions:
The Monopolists by Mary Pilon

Other possibilities (suggested by my RL book club members who had a games theme before I joined them--these suggestions are from meeting notes) They may or may not "fit." I have read none of them!

The Eight by Katherine Neville this is fiction about a "fictional" chess set belonging to Charlemagne
Board to Death fiction loosely associated with the game that was a pre-cursor to Monopoly
Birth of the Chess Queen: A History by Marilyn Yalom how the queen was added to the original game of chess
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov fiction about a grand chess master
Gambit (A Nero Wolfe Mystery Book 37) fiction about a famous world chess player and his murder
The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig about a chess master and and unknown passenger on a cruise ship--on my TBR because I've read the author before and liked him
The Death's Head Chess Club Jewish POW @Auschwitz vs. Nazi officer
The Will of an Eccentric by Jules Verne. A fictionalized version of Monopoly.
Interstellar Pig by William Sleator sci fi/board game survival YA
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie begins as a game of bridge
Vint by Anton Chekov a short story about Vint, a Russian card game
Omar Sharif Talks Bridge Omar Sharif

I can also recommend The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr which I read recently, about a Mechanical Turk.

oh completely forgot one of my faves by Claire North the gameshouse novellas

one of our fav games is Rummy kub based on the card game Rummy Looking for a book that explains some things we found The Official Rummikub Book We also enjoy the Times crossword puzzlel and will look for a book about its development

I love board games! Not sure if I have anything on the tbr, but I'll take a look.

I do recommend The Royal Game (also known as Chess Story) - I think it is such a great read.

If anyone is looking for something really short, but worthwhile, The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin perfectly fits this theme, too.

I think I might reread Alice in Wonderland for this. I have wanted to do that for a long time.

The whole Lymond Chronicles series by Dorothy Dunnett would probably count, especially Pawn in Frankincense which involves a harrowing live chess game. I'm not planning on rereading them right now though. A non-fiction book that I greatly enjoyed was Ivory Vikings. I don't know what I'll read yet for this. Maybe Birth of the Chess Queen. Or if fiction, maybe The Queen's Gambit or The Rook.

Right now my best bet is re-reading Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie, something I've wanted to do for some time.

I will probably read Cards on the Table. I'm slightly stumped otherwise as, while I'm interested in chess, I'm not sure I currently have any books on it. (I used to have an old chess book that my dad used in the 1950s or thereabouts, but it seems to have disappeared...)

I don't have anything on hand that will fit so I'll join the many other readers in Cards on the Table this month.

Just found Mah Jongg: The Art of the Game: A Collector's Guide to Mah Jongg Tiles and Setsd My mom used to have her friends over every wednesday; after we spent all afternoon cleaning the house and cooking.never understood the hook, but iits funny that I am attracted to a game with the same tiles maybe its the sound the make on the table
ill readThe Last Game of Rummikub

I read The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. This is a short story/novella (66 pages). It's a rather odd little book! It's the story of 2 men: a world class chess champion who must stare at the board constantly and takes his full allotted 15 minutes for each play vs a Dr who had been held as a POW by the Nazis. I think this is the early version of a psychological thriller. 4 stars

>15 Tess_W: Yeah, I've been thinking of doing that one too, on Kindle.

Pushkin's The Queen of Spades is only 99 cents on Kindle (US) and $1 on Audio.

I read The Queen of Katwe last year, if you want a great nonfiction about chess. It's pretty modern though.

I have finished Das schwebende Schachbrett (The floating chessboard) by Louis Couperus in which he tells an Arthurian romance-style knightly adventure. The Knights of the Round Table haven’t been on a quest for years and are getting bored, so they ask Merlin for help. He sends a floating chessboard – the second time – and when it flies off before the game is finished, Gawain offers to go looking for it.
Chess is not played much in this story, instead we get knights erring around Britain doing the usual things. But their heart isn’t really in it anymore...
It’s odd, and the antiquated language requires attention, but interesting nonetheless.

Yes, I really want to read something with a chess theme, rather than Cards on the Table, but I don't think I have anything suitable. I have a couple of books with Checkmate in the title but it's being used entirely figuratively as far as I can see.

I finished re-reading Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (1936), which I enjoyed, especially for the character of Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. The story revolves around a bridge game, and it plays an important part throughout the book, particularly in Poirot's assessments of the character of the murder suspects. Kept me guessing all the way to the very end, of course, as I had completely forgotten it.

I was also surprised to find two scenes of chess in my current audiobook, A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy (1873). The main story revolves around Elfride Swancourt and her two rival love interests, Stephen Smith and Henry Knight. Elfride plays chess with both, at different times and with different outcomes. The chess matches with Knight in particular are described by Hardy in move-by-move detail. Although not central to the story, the matches are important in revealing the characters of all 3 players.

>21 kac522: Ooh, I love Thomas Hardy, maybe I'll try that one instead of the Agatha Christie.

>22 john257hopper: Supposedly A Pair of Blue Eyes is somewhat autobiographical, with the heroine Elfride loosely based on Hardy's first wife Emma and the two rival lovers a mix of Hardy himself. An early work, it's not quite as "miserable" as his later novels. I've started a Hardy monthly "read-along", reading all 14 of his novels, hosted by a lady on booktube.

I completed The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin. It is a short story that centers around Hermann, a young officer in the Russian army who becomes obsessed with learning a secret gambling formula—a trio of winning cards—supposedly known only to an elderly countess. Some gothic elements. As I always find in short stories, short on plot! 42 pages 3 stars

>21 kac522: The Hardy sounds really good. However, I'm about 100 pages in to Michener's Poland and I'm thinking with school starting next week and with 688 pages to go, I probably won't get to that Hardy this month. On my WL it goes!

>23 kac522: Thanks for that, I am pretty sure I'm going to try this. This will be the first Thomas Hardy novel I have read other than on a trip to Dorset.

I have changed my mind and I stumbled across this novel Checkmate to Murder in which chess features more prominently, and which is much shorter than the Hardy book. Time is starting to run out for me before I go on holiday and start reading relating to that, so I'm plumping for this one instead. The author E C R Lorac was a prominent golden age author of crime fiction who also wrote under a number of aliases.

>10 WelshBookworm: Interesting, your reference to The Queen's Gambit by Diane Stuckart, because there's another novel of the same name by Walter Tevis (best known for The Hustler, made into the movie with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason). But caution on the Walter Tevis novel – read my review for trigger warnings:

One thing I found particularly distasteful about this book was Tevis's treatment of the quasi-lesbian relationship between Jolene and Beth in the orphanage. Now I do NOT mean by this that I find anything distasteful about lesbianism per se. My problem is its nature in this novel as a somewhat non-consensual sexual experiment by an older girl on a younger, which borders (at the very least) on child abuse and which is apparently seen by Tevis as innocuous or even as something positive. I get a sense of Tevis as a very creepy voyeur writing sexually provocative material about children.

I also have a hard time making sense of Beth's use of pills and alcohol – more precisely, of Tevis's reaction to Beth's addictions. He obviously wasn't presenting them as something desirable, but he doesn't depict Beth as making any particular attempt to conquer them, except to the extent that she goes on the wagon from time to time when excessive use interferes with her chess abilities. This is an issue, in fairness, that Tevis might have intended to address in his never-written sequel; but for The Queen's Gambit as a stand-alone, the treatment of Beth's addictions leaves the reader with a real sense of incompleteness in the story.

The lengthy descriptions of chess moves are positively tedious – but, then, I'm no chess aficionado. These lengthy passages made the book quite a quick-read for me since I barely skimmed over them.

(Had to copy-paste the review between spoiler tags because I couldn't figure out how to link to it.)

>27 john257hopper: Good choice, John.

I also read Cards on the Table. The murder took place at Mr. Shatiana’s card party to which Poirot, Mrs Oliver, Colonel Race and Superintendent Battle as well as four others (the suspects) had been invited. The game on offer was bridge with most playing except the host. After the murder the sleuths couldn’t help but investigate with Poirot winning his way to the solution.

So I have read Checkmate to Murder, another well plotted murder mystery from the pen of the prolific E C R Lorac, who also wrote under several pseudonyms between the 1930s and 50s. It is wartime (1944) and Inspector MacDonald investigates the murder of an unpopular old miser in an decrepit old house, attached to a studio rented by artist siblings, Bruce and Rosanne Manaton. A special constable has zealously arrested the old man's Canadian nephew who arrived on the same day at the house, but MacDonald considers there are other more likely suspects, and arrives at a conclusion that I did not expect (though it did depend on what I thought was a rather risky subterfuge). I quite like MacDonald's thoughtful and straightforward approach - he is not angst-ridden like so many contemporary fictional detectives, and I enjoy Lorac's simple and straightforward writing reflected in her fictional sleuth.

The chess connection comes in the form of two chessplaying guests of the Manatons, and several other are also chess players. The chess match is not absolutely essential to the plot, but forms an interesting dimension.

Finished up a reread of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and Looking Glass by reading what I've had around for years but never read: Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. The two Alice books are, I think, the greatest fantasy works ever written (though my own personal favorites are Tolkien, Philip Pullman's "Dust" novels, and Le Guin's Earthsea series, in that order). Gardner gives a pretty good play-by-play of the Looking Glass chess game.

Strictly rating The Annotated Alice based stand-alone for its annotational value, though, I'd give it 4****, not 5*****. It seemed sometimes that Gardner was throwing in trivia for the sake of padding, with even some reference to Finnegans Wake, which seemed to be stretching it a bit. I'm going to proceed on, though (and for a quick ROOTing), to Gardner's The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, though that won't fit into this month's theme. Not sure I ever read Snark straight through, and I definitely haven't read my Gardner-annotated copy.

From there, for some cotton-candy rereading from childhood, it's Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars: The First Five Novels, with the fifth novel being the Chessmen of Mars.

If I have time (and I think I should, since it's just a single play), there's Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624), the political satire of Prince Charles's (later King Charles I) unsuccessfully proposed Spanish marriage. It's the play that got the Globe Theater closed for a while and Middleton prosecuted by the Privy Council (he beat the rap on something of a technicality), with Middleton never writing any more plays. Should have read this a half-century ago in an undergraduate course in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but I'm not sure if I did.

Just finished Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Chessmen of Mars in John Carter of Mars: The First Five Novels 3½***. the old-fashioned "sword and planet" romances of childhood years. Haven't read the Barsoom (Mars) series in over sixty years, and they actually hold up better than I expected (at least these first five of the total eleven in the original ERB series). This specific Chessmen installment uses the Martian game of chess, jetan, except that in the city of Manator the game is played gladiatorially, on a board set in a combat arena, and when two live "pieces" occupy the same square they fight to the death.

Chessmen is definitely one of ERB's better books overall, and I think I'd give it 4**** (with the 3½*** rating going to the overall five-in-one anthology).

>32 CurrerBell: I want to read the Middleton book, but have literally run out of time!

I also read (but did not fully understand) Simplify the King's Gambit: A practical approach for beginning players by Carlos de Paula. I know the chess pieces names and the directions in which they can move. That is about it. I have played a few games of chess and done very poorly. It doesn't really interest me. But I found this little short book at the library! This is what I can surmise: The King's Gambit is a first move in the game of chess where the first player moves his pawn to e4. Depending upon what the opponent does, I get lost from there! I realize that the first move is a sacrifice of the white pawn to divert the black pawn. The 2nd player can either accept the gambit or make another play. It's not used much anymore. Supposedly Bobby Fischer in 1961 refuted the King's Gambit in a magazine article, which influenced many people to abandon it as a first move.

>28 CurrerBell: Seems like there are at least a half-dozen books with the same title. This one is the first of a mystery series featuring Leonardo da Vinci, who is setting up a live chess game for the Duke of Sforza, and one of his chessmen is found murdered...

read chekovs lady with a dogand liked it.' the man lived in Moscow and knew little of th countryIt the woman lives in the country was Saturday evening The sun was setting the work people were coming in crowds from the factory to station they bowed to the carriage in which Korlov was driving and he was charmed with evening and the farm houses and the villas on the road and the Birch trees and the quiet atmosphere all around when the fields and the woods and the signs seem to be preparing like the work people now on the eve of the holiday to rest and to perhaps to pray' Im enjoying the rest if the collection