Borges largely preferred genre fiction to literary fiction:

André Maurois … wrote, “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges had read everything, and especially what nobody reads anymore[emphasis mine]: the Kabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound — he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas — but it is vast.” Maurois was mostly correct; Borges read everything, but there was a lot he didn’t finish, including “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Madame Bovary,” Proust and Thomas Mann. A great deal of highfalutin American and European writers left little or no impression on him (the major exception being the French symbolist poets, especially Paul Valéry). The last great modernist of 20th century literature drew his primary inspiration not from other modernists but from styles and modes of literature (fables, folk tales, ancient epics) that had become proud words on dusty shelves and from writers of prose and poetry such as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton (particularly the Father Brown mysteries), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Irish fabulist Lord Dunsany, and Argentine “gaucho” poets, writers who, for one reason or another, Western literature had relegated to the twilight realm of the praised but unread. He preferred genre literature to the deep-dish classics. –“Borges: A Life” by Edwin Williamson via http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/08/27/borges/index_np.html?pn=3 [Jan 2007]