Every now and then I become slightly obsessed with the mind-expanding game of chess.
Lately I have been playing the game with my five-year-old and while he may never be a grandmaster, he is making very good progress.
To ensure that I don't get caught out with too many knights' forks, I thought I would check out some chess-related reading matter.
Winning Move, a daily feature by Raymond Keene in The Times, where you have to work out what happens in the endgame, is pretty addictive, and I have also been enjoying Zugzwang, a chess-related murder mystery by Ronan Bennett, which is set in St Petersburg, at the time of the Russian Revolution.
Garry Kasparov, who became world champion at the astonishingly young age of 22, appears to dominate books on chess and I quite fancy reading Garry Kasparov Modern Chess Part 1: Revolution in the 1970s, How Life Imitates Chess, and the My Great Predecessors series.
I've got a vague memory of reading Kasparov's autobiography at some point, so I might try to dig that out of the local library too.
When I was at college I enjoyed many a great game with fellow would-be grandmaster and English undergraduate Matt Taylor.
For some reason, most of the games were accompanied by cups of Lapsang Souchong and Bob Dylan's Infidels album, which is probably why I lost my queen so many times.
In a break from the chess board I have thoroughly enjoyed Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith, and The Ingenious Edgar Jones by Elizabeth Garner, about a mysterious child prodigy who helps to build the Museum of Natural History in Oxford.
The novel is fresh out in paperback and I urge you to read it. I think this heartwarming tale could be recognised as a classic in years to come.