Read Everything's Eventual by Stephen King, The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King, and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.
Everything's Eventual was a short story collection King wrote while still recovering from the hit and run incident he had. It was very, very good. Even though I liked Night Shift, it's insane the difference between that and this one. Granted over twenty years had past, but it's nice to see how improved his writing has become. King has a good intro concerning ebooks (this is 2001) and how when he wrote and released Riding the Bullet via electronically it caused a huge frenzy. He said he did it to try new media, to keep his edge, but he was disappointed because in interviews no one asked him about the story, they just cared about the numbers of people who checked out a book in electronic format. Ironically, the audio rights went for over 100k. The stories in here are good, including Everything's Eventual (the title) and 1408. I like the book better than the movie, though to be fair th book version is much, much shorter. All in all, a good read.
The Talisman by Peter Straub and King was a lengthy read. Fans of King's Dark Tower series will feel a lot of similarities between Roland's world and the Territories (the alternate world that is part of the setting for the book, our world being the other). It's the story of a twelve year old boy who must travel from New Hampshire to California to find the Talisman. His mother is dying of cancer, his father's been murdered by his friend and business partner, so she's all his has left. In the Territories, his mother's double or Twinner is also dying and if she dies, the fate of the Territories will lie in the hands of his father's business partner's Twinner. There is some good writing here. The book gets off to a slow start (like most of King's lengthy works) but is running down hill at a breakneck pace by the time you reach 70%. Especially touching is the Wolf character. I get the feeling when I read this that this is a cross between an American take on Tolkien, fairy tales, and King's own Dark Tower universe. It's worth the read.
Fight Club...I've loved the movie for years. It spawned an era of anti-establishment, anti-work movies where the protagonist hates their job and goes to crazy lengths to change it. I finally read the book. I was surprised by how good it was. The story is basically just free thought from the protagonist. Most of the time when he's speaking to other characters there isn't even proper punctuation (though the other characters do have dialogue tags). There was some really good writing in here. It's definitely a style I personally could not hope to emulate. It's just a little too foreign for me. I like the visceral mental diatribes, they add weight to the character's mental state. Anyone who has seen the movie won't be surprised by the ending. I would like to be able to read it blissfully unaware of the duality of the protagonist, but I couldn't. In some ways the book handles it better than the movie, but in many ways the movie passes it on that end of things. Then again, it's much easier to do that in the format of cinema as opposed to the written word. The movie doesn't follow the book exactly, so there are some nice twists and turns. I think Chuck has some interesting, thought provoking things to say about society...the rest I think he's talking out of his ass. It's alright though, because he remains true to the character. You can't ask for more than that and at the end of the day you can take it or leave it when you turn the last page.There's an afterward written after the movie made it so famous. It's really funny how he got his idea and just ran with it, not expecting much. His advance was 6k. I liked that he was cognizant of the fact that what he was doing structure wise in his novel went against the norm. The whole point of the "rules" was to anchor the reader in while we whipped from scene to scene and character to character. He did a good job. It's sad how many people out there believed everything he wrote and chose to emulate it. The first five pages of the afterward are describing all of the crazy things people did in the wake of its popularity. All in all, good stuff.
I'm going to read the sequel to the Talisman and depending on how that goes, hopefully be tackling some new Butcher and GRRM shortly.