The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

A Soviet Chess Championship

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis was a lightweight, entertaining read. I saw the movie a while back and it was great. I played chess a few times when I was younger, but I never developed much enthusiasm for it. After all, it's just a game and one plays games for fun. Chess takes a lot of mental energy and it just seemed to me that that energy could be put to use doing something more productive. Yes, Beth Harmon makes a bundle of money playing chess, but she's the only one. Everyone else goes home broke. Some people develop obsessions and sometimes those obsessions produce amazing results, but I suspect most obsessions only serve to keep people's mind's occupied and produce nothing exceptional.

Soviet Kirovets K-700 Tractor

Page 214 "she saw three enormous tractors, far bigger than anything she had seen in America". They might have been Kirovets tractors. They were certainly big, and the time frame is right. Tractors this size are common now in the USA, but I don't think there were any like this here sixty years ago.

Words I was familiar with, but didn't know the exact meaning of.

• Page 198 "Hani soit qui mal y pense" - French for "shame on anyone who thinks wrong"
• Page 212 antimacassar - a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease and dirt or as an ornament.
• Page 240 eidetic - relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.