I sometimes get asked why I didn’t include a chapter on chess in my recently published co-authored book about boardgames. The answer is that since I’m not a chess specialist, I didn’t think I was up to the job. The bar has been set high because chess is the only boardgame in the world that’s already the subject of an enormous, well-established literary sub-genre.

And I’m not just talking about dry analyses with titles like Fire On Board: Shirov’s Best Games and Beating the French Defense with the Advance Variation. There are also plenty of books about the lives of chess grandmasters and the tragicomically obsessive nature of chess culture—including an excellent new specimen called All The Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love and Ruining Everything by Canadian-American writer Sasha Chapin.

The author isn’t a particularly great player. But that’s one of the things that makes the book so good: Chapin perfectly captures the daily agony of being a chess obsessive (as I once was) who secretly knows that his brain isn’t wired—and never will be wired—in the way of a true master. You study and you play and you study and you play, only to have your mediocrity smushed in your face on a flight to Europe by a 14-year-old prodigy from Belarus who was literally watching an in-flight movie while he casually demolished you in just 25 moves (just a fictional example, and totally not based on any kind of real humiliation I once endured in the mid-1990s).