Any recommendations for other books?

So I finished reading this book called Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski. I don't think I got it.
Actually, I was ready to pack it in half-way through, but I figured that I should at least stay with it. On the surface, it was fairly interesting. However, the narrator annoyed me, as he was helpless and hopeless, and nothing ever seemed to lead anywhere. I can understand the interest the writer holds, though. There's enough material for a reader to analyze and plow through if he or she had the inclination: postmodernism, the writer's use of hyperbole and exaggeration, this, that, the other. I can imagine English majors everywhere crunching away on laptops in dimly lit coffeeshops, using this book to prove a thesis.
During the course of reading it, I kept on thinking back to Keruoac's On the Road and that book's main character, Sal Paradise. The narrator in Ham on Rye is what Sal could have become if he never left home, never met Dean Moriarty, and grew increasingly bitter.