One book everyone seems to forget, and my personal favorite by him, was “Eaters of the Dead”, which despite the grisly title is actually a really interesting book. It’s based on a real manuscript by Ahmed Ibn Fadian, the famous Arab 10th century traveler and poet. You might have seen the movie “The 13th Warrior”, which was loosely based on the book (though the movie really sucked). The Andromeda Strain is another great one…though the book was thoroughly researched, actually all of the footnotes and endnotes and references were completely made up. While that might sound like cheating, the series of footnotes and endnotes themselves make up a rather interesting story in and of themselves. Danielewski took this idea and ran with it to the extreme in “House of Leaves”.
Another one everyone forgets is “The Great Train Robbery.” A really exciting story and a pretty accurate depiction of mid-19th century Victorian England. Also made into a movie with Sean Connery (pretty good, I thought). “Rising Sun” is another good one…not fantastic, but again, it shows he was an author who could write about just about anything (10th century scandanavia, victorian england, cosmopolitan japan). Anything he wrote in the last 15 years just seemed like garbage to me though. His early books were great because they were all well thought-out period pieces. Once he started losing his mind and going political, I couldn’t stand to finish his books. Timeline? Give me a break. Interesting premise, but the whole book is just a big, long gimmick. Check out his stuff from the 70s and 80s…much more interesting.