88 books like Fight Club Series

I adore this book.

Not only is it loaded with suspenseful moments, but the heartache, Pi’s incredible journey, and the masterful metaphor make it one of those books that will always be near the top of my reading pile. Even the side story of why Pi changed his name is written with humor and heart.

I am a fan of survival stories, and I’m also an animal lover, so the combination of animals playing such a huge role, coupled with Pi struggling to survive when the odds are against him, makes this a great read.

I used this book to relieve the boredom of a long daily commute.

Instead of looking out of a train window at the same old scenery I'd passed a thousand times before, I was now taken to a dystopian society in which everything which I had taken for granted about family life was turned upside down. Where humans are manufactured to a specification instead of being born. A new pseudo religion where everyone makes the sign of the ‘T’, to signify their devotion to the original Ford Model T, which was the first vehicle to be manufactured on an assembly line.

This is a unique entry in that the cursed place is a framing device, for this collection of mostly disturbing tales. For his first-ever collection of short stories, Palahniuk brings his wretched cast of characters to a haunted house, where each in turn offers his or her own demented tale. They don’t all work, but a number of the stories really stick with you, and this spooky old house at the center of it ratchets the intensity up another level—it’s not a static situation they are in, there, so the plot progresses to its own warped conclusion on this front as well. 

“Many mixed martial artists claim they experience something like bliss at the moment they lose consciousness from a choke.” That’s a real quote from the book, which tells a personal journey of a 33-year-old man trying to to understand what it’s like to hit and get hit, and why some weirdos like me love it so much.

Count that as self-discovery if you’re fighter or an observational expedition if you can’t understand how someone can be one. Either way, keep that quote away from my wife, before she starts to rethink the decision to get our son into martial arts too.

East and West have massively different approaches to fighting. To how it’s trained, to what’s the goal of training… this book is about that contrast.

About the cultural shock experienced by the first American to study at the legendary Shaolin Temple, in China. That’s what my brain said, at least. But if I have to be honest, while I let Polly carry me through his report, I was mostly living the ultimate fantasy of any martial artist of my generation, which is becoming a Shaolin monk, just like those I grew up watching on TV. Thank you, Matt.

This is my favorite book, ever. In part because it’s the story of the greatest of all Samurai. But there’s more to that.

In the long run, martial arts are an exercise of self-development. Of tapping into your inner beast, setting it free, then controlling it back. No book ever written tells that journey as beautifully as Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa.

Often called “Japan’s Gone with the Wind,” the book marches from cliffhanger to cliffhanger through the glorious life of the protagonist, although for me its mark was deeper than any of these electrical moments of adventure. For my eyes, once I crossed the last words of the book, what was left was the realization of how long and chained true change really is.

When I read this it felt like a seagoing version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it was touch and go which to include in this list. But if you’re like me, and love the sea, there’s no real choice.

In this epic novel we’re shown how the Danish port town of Marstal – and people who call it home – evolve over the course of a century. The novel brilliantly captures the pull that the sea has over the town’s inhabitants, and their struggle to keep what makes them human when faced with its power and scale.

There’s a fantastical element too, just a touch here and there, which somehow matches how most of us experience the unexplainable.  

When Toronto bookstore owner Jean Mason hears she may have a doppelganger, it sets off a strange series of events that show how fragile our grip on reality really is. Equal parts psychological horror, ghost story, warm family drama, and literary look at mental illness, this dizzying and at times difficult novel asks if we genuinely know ourselves and the nature of our existence. It may leave you like its bewildered main character: full of questions about identity and struggling to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.

This book, for me, stands alongside The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a necessary stepping stone toward all modern 'dark double' fiction. I actually first encountered the book via one of its looser adaptations, The Man Who Haunted Himself, starring Roger Moore. I must have seen that some time in the 70s, and it stuck with me across five decades without losing its core power. The Armstrong original, written in 1940 then expanded later, is still a legitimately creepy tale, particularly in terms of the questions it refuses to answer. Watching Pelham's slow-motion collapse into paranoia and chaos is a genuinely uneasy experience, like seeing The Picture of Dorian Gray through the eyes of the portrait itself.

As a model unreliable narrator, you couldn't pick a more disarming armed robber than Mark "Chopper" Read. He described his pseudo-autobiographical book series as "the truth, the half-truth and nothing like the truth," which may be the most honest statement he ever made. None of this is to suggest that Read wasn't every inch the ultra-violent toecutter he sketches out in his writing. It's just that every word in Chopper is working toward the same goal: building a larger-than-life self-caricature to outshine and outlast the man himself. The cover quote boldly declares, "I regret nothing." The final line of the book admits, "I regret everything." Chopper Read lived and died within that contradiction, and his story's all the more mesmerising for its gunsmoke and mirrors.