The Christian Science Monitor ran a peculiar list of “David Foster Wallace’s 10 Favorite Books” recently, a ranking that’s since been picked up in places like Flavorwire. (The list was originally published without comment from the author in 2007, in the collection The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.) The list isn’t what you’d expect from Wallace, or indeed any literary luminary, as DFW passes over names like Shakespeare and Pynchon and Joyce for Stephen King, Robert Harris, and Tom Clancy—and a couple of books (the Ed McBain 87^thPrecinct mystery and the natural horror titleAlligator) that seem to be out print:

The Screwtape Lettersby C.S. Lewis
The Stand by Stephen King
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
The Thin Red Line by James Jones
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Fuzzby Ed McBain
Alligatorby Shelley Katz
The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

What should we make of this? I don’t think Wallace was screwing with us. While his own fiction can be dense and difficult, he was a vocal advocate for straightforwardness—and just plain being nice; he wasn’t making light of these novels, nor, I think, simply being enigmatic, like Bob Dylan making a Christmas album.

[A must read if you are a DFW fan …click the link to read the entire article.]