Compiled from “The Unfinished” by D. T. Max.

- Tom Clancy books, “for their ability to pack in facts.”
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon, from whom Wallace took “his character names and attitude of paranoia.”)
- Don DeLillo’s White Noise (DeLillo, from whom he took his “deadpan dialogue.”)
- Wittgenstein
- John Barth (Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is “a parodic homage” to Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse.”)
- Dean Koontz
- Flight of Fear
- Stephen Crane
- Edith Wharton
- Philip Roth
- St. Paul
- Rousseau
- Dostoyevsky

***

“Books that only give pleasure to their authors”:

Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog”
Anything by Ayn Rand
Anything by Günter Grass
Anything by Pynchon “at his rare worst”