Mohsin Hamid's six favorite books

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, and his essays in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Born in 1971, he has lived about half his life, on and off, in Lahore. He also spent part of his early childhood in California, attended Princeton and Harvard, and worked for a decade as a management consultant in New York and London, mostly part-time.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Dune by Frank Herbert

This 1965 space saga set on a desert planet is a racy read and one of the best-selling sci-fi novels of all time. But for me it was the Middle Eastern, indeed quasi-Muslim, inspirations that Herbert layered into his book that introduced me to the idea of literary hybridity. It's sadly hard to imagine, post-9/11, this novel being written today.

Read about the other books on Hamid's list.

Dune is among io9's ten science fiction novels you pretend to have read, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best vendettas in literature and ten of the best deserts in literature, and among the best and worst childbirth scenes in sci-fi & fantasy.

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--Marshal Zeringue