Annotated Go Bibliographies

`Just one game,'
they said, and started to play.
That was yesterday.

Note: I'm finding that I don't have as much time as I'd like to read go books these days. If you've recently read a book that you'd like to review, please e-mail your review to me. Please tell me if you would like your name to be linked to a web page, your e-mail address, or neither; also, if you could include your rank, that would be great.

• The annotated bibliography of go books in English.
• Robert Jasiek's Go Book Reviews, covering a selection of books in English, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.
• Bibliographie du Go en français.
• Bibliografia Italiana di Go.

Those are the main parts of these pages, but there's other stuff here too:

• The English go bibliography, organized by the subject of the books.
• The English go bibliography, organized by the publisher of the books.
• A list of older go books that I haven't reviewed. (Newer ones are in the ToDo list.)
• A list of rumors about forthcoming books.
• Future plans for this bibliography.
• A list of recent changes to this bibliography.
• Notes on how to teach go.

These pages are intended to contain an annotated bibliography of all of the books about go that have appeared in English. There's also a link to Robert Jasiek's book reviews, which I'm hosting. I've included links to similar projects for French books and Italian books that I'm not involved in personally; follow those links for information about them. I intend to keep this as up to date as possible; new books should be added within a few months of their publication, though information about them may be sketchy until I've had a chance to read them. (If you're not sure whether or not I'm aware of a book, you can look at my to do page.) Older books that I don't have copies of aren't reviewed; they are, however, listed on my old books page. (That page also contains more info about the planned scope of this bibliography.) These pages started off as an annotated bibliography, with brief descriptive comments of each book, but they've started to expand more into short reviews; this may explain why some of the reviews are much shorter than others.

The reviews are organized in three different ways: there is a list organized by difficulty, which presents books in the order in which you might want to read them if you were starting to play go; a list organized by subject; and a list organized by publisher. Each method organization contains links to the same reviews, but they are listed in a different order, and there may be some extra comments containing information relevant to the method of organization. If you're new to go, I'd recommend the looking at list by difficulty first; that version has the most helpful commentary and the most useful organization.

I've also made a list of rumors about forthcoming books, a list of books that I have copies of that I need to add to the bibliography, and a list of English-language go books that aren't included in the bibliography. These latter books aren't included because I don't own them, but probably all or almost all of them are of interest only to collectors anyways.

These reviews are an outgrowth of my collection of go books, the contents of which are listed here. My comments all stem from my reading of the books in question (I own copies of all of these books, with a few clearly marked exceptions), and you may or may not find that you agree with them; different people get different amounts out of different books. If you have comments about my reviews or if you disagree with them, please send me e-mail: I'm looking for alternative viewpoints on these books, and I'd love to be able to add other people's viewpoints to the reviews here. Also, if you find any bad links or errors, or if there are in print books that I haven't included that are more than a few months old and that aren't mentioned here, please tell me about it, though read the comments at the top of that page first. (I even want to hear about small typos.) And I'm trying to keep an up-to-date list of which books are in print, so if any of my info about that is wrong, please tell me. (Books are supposed to be in print unless I've said otherwise in my comments.) I try to list Asian names in the appropriate order, but I'm sure that I get it wrong sometimes, and there are hard judgment calls to make there.

A few more miscellaneous notes: I'm an AGA 1 kyu; I was an AGA 2 kyu when I wrote the vast majority of the reviews. It has been suggested that it would be good to include reviews of go products in other media (software, videos, etc.); however, I don't own any such products and don't plan to buy any, so I can't do that myself. If anybody is interested, I'd encourage you to either make your own page with that stuff on it or send me reviews to include here; it would be nice if we could get a coordinated effort going on that. Also, if people would like to do reviews of books in other languages similar to what Didier Kropp is doing in French, that would be great. Many thanks to Didier for the work he's done on the French reviews. (Which he is now hosting on his own web site.)

Here are some more go book-related links:

• Schaak en Go winkel Het Paard is the source for go books in Europe.
• J. W. & S. Hardy has go books in Australia.
• GoShop is a Swedish vendor.
• Kiseido.
• Yutopian.
• Good Move Press.
• Slate & Shell.
• Steve Fawthrop's list of go books and reviews.
• Ken Warkentyne's go page, which probably has the best collection of go links anywhere on the net.
• IBUKI Trading Post should have every go book in print. Or at least that was once true; they seem to be slipping.
• The AGA archive index.
• The AGA's book list. This is a list of English-language go books that was once almost as complete as mine is, but it only gives capsule descriptions of the books (and hasn't been updated in a few years). It's good for quick browsing. Schaak has a similar page as well.
• Waller's Go Books specializes in books written in Korean.

There are some go books that I'm missing from my collection that I'd like to have. My current wish list is: Go Para Principiantes, by Iwamoto Kaoru, and any of the books that are listed here. So if you have a copy of any of those that you wouldn't mind selling, please send me e-mail; I'll pay any reasonable price for them.

Many thanks to Keith Amman, Adam Atkinson, Steve Bailey, Lukas Biewald, Paul Brennan, William Cobb, Theo van Ees, Pelle Evensen, John Fairbairn, Gilles whose last name I don't know, Gaétan Gouge, David Godinger, David Goldberg, Alberto Hernando, Tim Hunt, Craig Hutchinson, Barry Jacobs, Robert Jasiek, Tim Jennings, Tristan Jones, David Keeble, Didier Kropp, Corrin Lakeland, Doug Larson, the Massachusetts Go Association, Steven Mays, Mats Nygren, Elliott Pitilon, Joachim Rau, Taylor Reid, Dan Schmidt, Patrick Smith, Dieter Verhofstadt, Edward Wallner, Ken Warkentyne, Peter Zandveld, and everybody who's written, translated, or published a go book. (I've probably forgotten lots of other people whom I should thank, so thanks to everybody else, too!)

The quote at the top of this page is taken from The Go Player's Almanac, compiled and edited by Richard Bozulich.

Last modified: Sun Nov 25 21:57:19 PST 2007