From my perspective (which certainly isn't universal), I'm indifferent to the list monad - in your example I'd (weakly) argue that as there are lots of list functionals it was as good as a coincidence that the solution was a monadic functional rather than just a list functional (or a generalization of a list functional through Data.Traversable or Data.Foldable).
For monadic patterns I think more about the effect than particular combinators - State models read-write state, Reader models read-only "state", Writer models write only "state", Maybe models partiality (so it can model errors without error messages), Either/Error models errors with tangible error codes or messages. As you get a handle on effects - you quickly realize you need to combine them so monad transformers become important.
There aren't any books yet on advanced Haskell except "The Fun of Programming" - this is a multi-author book collecting some quite disparate work, so it is worth browsing a copy before deciding whether or not its a book you'd want. Richard Bird's new book has many examples of advanced coding but it does this with simple, elegant code. Its a very good book though it isn't a book about advanced language features.
In the absence of books, papers are the best place as they are more polished than blogs. Most relevant is the Haskell Symposium (which used to be called the Haskell Workshop), check the link below for the proceedings which will list the papers presented, then do a search for anything you find interesting - in most cases the authors make the paper publicly available.
http://haskell.org/haskell-symposium/
