Other great books?

Well, for starters, you could spend some time reading the book forum.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. sorry.

read vonnegut.

also, to the first guy. You'll hear a lot of people start preaching the gospel of will cristopher baer. Don't fall for it! Kiss Me, Judas was ok, but nothing to get all uppity about. Although I am kinda interested in his new one when and if it ever comes out.

Craig Clevenger is much better.

hey, vd. you should definitely listen to nate and phil. some of the time. they know their shit, for the most part, but they can both be acidic.

as for baer: kiss me, judas was a great fucking book. he's more an internal writer than chuck. he does his best to get under your skin.

as for the most common formula:

most people who start reading chuck burn through his library in no time. a week or two and youre done. so most move on to craig clevenger's "the contortionists' handbook", which is a great fucking read. he went on to write a noir novel after that titled "dermaphoria", which a fairly perfect and beautifully written novel.

some of my favorite finds after getting into chucks works:

american psycho and less than zero by bret easton ellis
25th hour by david benioff
susanna moore's in the cut
jesus' son by denis johnson
ice at the bottom of the world by mark richard
wise blood by flannery oconnor
the sun also rises by hemingway
gatsby by fitzgerald
the things they carried by tim obrien
bright lights big city by jay mcinerney
catcher in the rye
cormac mccarthy novels
same with steve erickson
drown by junot diaz
another mark richard book, charity
gao xingjian's one man's bible
geek love by katherine dunn
and heartsick by chelsea cain
oh, and clown girl by monica drake

cain and drake were both workshop buddies with chuck, and drake even instructed a writing intensive here

as did will christopher baer, and clevenger instructed two of them

also, there is a list from chuck found here:

http://astore.amazon.com/officchuckpalaha?_encoding=UTF8&node=29

as you can tell, most of the books ive found and loved came from the man himself
chucky p loves to recommend great books. it was per his instruction in the workshop that i forced myself to purchase and read gatsby. my first fitzgerald. it wasnt my last. ive read everything by hempel. hempel is chuck's god when it comes to writing. he said of clevenger's first book that it was the best book [he'd] read in easily five years. easily. maybe ten years. and he proclaimed to read jesus' son three hundred times before he wrote the first draft of lullaby in a mere six weeks.

anway, welcome to the cult
the great thing about finding an author like chuck is, you read one of his books and you wonder if he's written anything else and then you find fight club and read it and think the guy is great so you look more into him, to see if he has another book coming out, and you find he has a dozen books out right now. that's what happened for me with steve erickson and cormac mccarthy. i found most of the authors ive enjoyed after i read everything by chuck, including all of his interviews and articles. there's a whole other world of authors out there i never knew about until i started reading chuck and started listening to the namedrops.

-kabol

..

Thanks everyone!...kinda

Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors so I've read pretty much everything I can get my hands on by him so thats an out.

Also thanks for the suggestions JK. I saw some books that i've read already on your list and some I've heard nothing but great things about. I will defently look into those!

Thanks again!

And also...am I confused...Isn't this the Book forum?

What xec meant is that there are a lot of great threads in the book club forum about books we'd, as a site, recommend. Check those out and you're sure to find a lot of opinions about what Kabol mentioned.
As for my recommendations:
Rischard Grossman, Stephen Graham Jones, John Fowles, Alaisdar Gray, Hermann Melivelle, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Always the latter, more than anything else. Read him.

dammit. forgot stephen graham jones
and
ask the dust is a beautifully written novel

There are a lot of typos in my post...

Check out I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan. It is written with a very dry, and biting British satire. Brilliant!!

As JKabol said, anything by Cormac Mccarthy (The Road, or Blood Meridian)
Also One flew over the cuckoo's nest or anything by Ken Kesey
And also if you haven't read it, l'étranger-Albert Camus

I'm sure these are recommended in other threads, but this is the newest one I see and I don't see these suggestions:

Chemical Pink, by Katie Arnoldi
The Fighter, by Craig Davidson (Rust and Bone if you want his short stories)
Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock

These are three of the most physical books I've read in a long time, and all three are GREAT.

Also, a second vote for
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
&
The Collected Works of Amy Hempel

Reading those two books of short stories will make you a better writer. Guaranteed*

*not a guarantee

...and no one here mentioned HOUSE OF LEAVES by Danielewski??? I bow my head in shame towards my fellow culties.

You will be chewing on that book (perhaps literally) for quite some time. A book so deep he even had the letters in the bibliography published as a separate book.

Letters of an insane mother to her estranged son, that were only briefly even alluded to in the entire novel, now THAT is character development!

Caveat, it is a polarizing read, you will either love it or just put a dent in your wall with it when you throw it...

Or you'll shit your pants in terror. House of Leaves is one of the only books that has ever scared me.

The others being The Cobra Event by Richard Preston and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.

Of course, I was reading the Exorcist at 2 in the morning in a lonely park where I was working.

The Cobra Event, though, has some of the most physical descriptions of the effects of horrible diseases that you will ever read. I'd recommend all of these, but especially The Cobra Event.

You should read 'The Electric Jesus Corpse' I forget who wrote it but it should be easy enough to find if you're interested.

That book terrified me, and I still can't believe I got through the whole thing. I couldn't even have it in my bedroom at night. Or face up so that I could see the cover. I'll never read that one again...

I've been burning through Raymond Carver lately. Reading the guy is like an instant writing class. He's so good, it's amazing. I like his fiction better than his poetry, though. I recently read Cathedral, What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love, and Where I'm Calling From. Those books are just about perfect.

you might like the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay.

Dying, simply dying to know what kind of work involves being in a park at 2am...

a) undercover cop
is this Chris Hansen
c) ranger at a 24hr state park
d) performance artist

Do enlighten the curious among us...

I'll mention this, otherwise it probably won't get mentioned:

If you like Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, or noir in general, I fucking dare you to not love this book. It's the kind of read where you close the book being absolutely certain that the writer must be at least a little bit insane. And Jason Starr looks the part. The novel is about a New Yorker who meets a man who molested him when they were kids, and he decides to take revenge. Like almost all of Jason Starr's characters, our main character is impulsive and prone to fits of rage and jealousy, and it's narrated well enough that you can understand what a detestable little shit might be thinking. Starr writes anxiety and paranoia so well you'll break into a cold sweat.

oh, damn, night. i remember reading about that maybe two years ago. he and his wife just had a baby. he talked about donald westlake (among others), and his wife has a day job so he's home all day with the baby and he's a very gifted young writer with a hard and zany noir quality to his pen.

of course ive had a few snakechases since then and couldve easily switched one two or all of my facts and cant bring myself to search the interweb at the moment, but i remember thinking i wanna read that dude. so thank you for the reminder. next time i hit the barnes store, i will search out at least one of his books.
-kabol

Kasey,

I was working the irrigation system at a park. The huge sprinklers had to run all night, but in shifts. The amount of water the sprinklers put out was amazing, like enough to put out a building fire - thousands of gallons per second. I don't remember the exact number. It was on a dike that borders two rivers. It was creepy as hell - as this park was used as a druggie meeting place (strange men with needles). It also had a public restroom where closeted gay men would meet for discrete love after the bars closed, which was fine by me, but meant that sooner or later a queen-fight would break out and I'd find blood on the walls and an occasional lost tooth on the cement.

Harry Potter.

Can't go wrong with Clown Girl. Drake's style is very similar to Drake's (or Chuck's is very similar to her's.....)