In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.
Hasan Minhaj’s first job didn’t end the way he hoped. “I got fired for being late and not shaving,” he says of his teenage gig at Safeway. “Craig David had young brown boys in a chokehold in the early 2000s,” he adds of the British singer, whose infamous beard became inspiration for Minhaj’s own stylings. “There was a geometry math homework assignment on my face, and I refused to shave it.”
Facial hair might not have been permitted, but Minhaj had a trick up his sleeve — or so he thought. “I put a Band-Aid over it like, ‘Oh, I cut myself shaving,’ and my manager called me in,” he recalls. “He had me remove the Band-Aid, and that was my second strike. I was gone.”
Corporate policy has long since ceased being a concern for Minhaj. After earning a Political Science degree from UC Davis, the 40-year-old comedian broke out via his San Francisco stand-up work before getting hired as a correspondent on The Daily Show from 2014 to 2018. His 2017 Netflix special, Homecoming King, won him a Peabody Award; he won a second for Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, which also picked up an Emmy Award and two Webbys. Next, though, comes his first produced feature film, Best of the Best, which tells the story of two childhood best friends who go to college together and compete in collegiate Bollywood dancing, putting their closeness under pressure.
“So you have a bunch of STEM majors by day, but then hardcore dancers by night,” he says of the Bollywood fusion dance collegiate scene. “And yeah, there’s a lot of hormones and a lot of feelings and a lot of yearning and a lot of real passion that is both comedic, but I also think it’s beautiful in the sense that we’re all these diaspora kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, [and] we’re able to reclaim the vestiges of colonialism and these kind of sectarian beefs that we all come from, but we get to reclaim it in the best version through our love of music and dance.”
He was drawn to that time period for personal reasons, too. “College is also the first time you get to kind of be number one on the call sheet,” he says. “You get to be the lead of your own life — who am I? What do I believe? Who do I want to be? There’s something really beautiful also about this idea of infinite possibility.” For Minhaj, this meant rejecting some of what his family had envisioned for him. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and you’re just going head-first into Biochem 103,” he recalls. “It’s just so hard. You’re doing math, but there’s no numbers.”
Minhaj began performing stand-up while in college, and it’s also where he met his wife, Beena. “I’m entering my 40s,” he says. “We’ve been married now for 11 years. I’ve known her 20 years. That’s a long time. Funny enough, some of the kind of painful, cute, yearning stories and moments, those were inspirations for Best of the Best.”
The pair have two children, who Minhaj has tried to persuade of the joys of reading, in which he found refuge as a child. “For many children of immigrants, the library became this place where after school we would go there and wait to get picked up,” he says of his early reading habits. “My kind of policy is, I will get you literally any book. Any book you want, it’s yours.”
He continues: “One thing I’m struggling with at this point in my life is dealing with finiteness. Things are feeling finite. This past weekend I was with my parents. I’m starting to see them slow down. I’m really starting to see them age. My dad’s hair dye, it’s missing in some spots. I’m seeing time really take its toll and I’m really processing this like, ‘Oh, these are going to be the last few moments we probably have together. The window is closing, and it’s scary. I’m not ready for it and I don’t know how I’m going to get through it.’ But what I love about reading children’s books with them is that feeling of infiniteness.”
Keep reading to discover more about Minhaj’s four favorite books.
His first pick is comedian Roy Wood Jr.’s 2025 memoir The Man of Many Fathers, which delves into his challenging relationship with his father and experiences parenting his son, Henry. Minhaj and Wood are longtime friends who appeared on The Daily Show together from 2015 to 2018. Minhaj also describes him as a “big brother.”
“There [are] these really profoundly beautiful stories about pain, understanding, longing. There’s so much of that in his book, and I’ve known him for over 15 years,” he says. “The reason why I love people when they write a book is they have to really bleed on the page. I don’t know if that’s a byproduct of your editor, capitalism. I don’t know what it is, but they’re like, ‘We need more.’”
The memoir also diverts the typical tropes of a book on fatherhood. “It’s not the typical sort of male self-help book. He writes the book to his son,” he says. “There’s a particular kind of cadence… There’s just these beautiful lessons about adulthood that I took away from it and I was just profoundly moved by.”
His second choice is the 2025 Pulitzer-prize winner James by Percival Everett, which retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved character.
“I always love in books when they take a premise and they just kind of flip it on its head,” he says. “Percival Everett does it brilliantly in this book.”
Toward the end, it’s revealed that James is the child’s biological father, though Huck has been perceived as white his whole life. “It’s such a beautiful articulation that it’s only about the way the world sees you. That’s how you navigate race in America,” he says. “He’s not seen as Black, so he can play the charade as long as he’d like. And you see Huck understand for the first time real empathy for the privileges that he has and the way he’s been able to navigate and move through the world.”
His third pick is Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian, a 2021 magical realist coming-of-age story following a second-generation Indian teenager in the Atlanta suburbs. Also the child of immigrants, Minhaj says the book reminded him of the feelings of jealousy that came when one of his classmates, Nikhil Sachdev, announced he’d be attending Stanford while Minhaj went to UC Davis.
“To me, Nikhil was a pop star, and I was like, ‘I’m going to a state school and I’m going to end up living at home with my parents.’ So I really felt like a f*ck-up, a failure, like, ‘Oh, this is it. This is your destiny,’” he says. “What I loved about Gold Diggers is it’s the first real analysis through magical realism of this idea of ambition and coveting that.”
He also attests the book is accurate. “Sanjena perfectly describes male puberty brilliantly,” he says. “I don’t know how she did it, but she nailed it.”
His final selection is this year’s breakout literary hit, Yesteryear. The novel follows a “trad wife” influencer, Natalie, when she’s transported to 1855 and forced to live out the realities of the life she had been presenting.
“Every comedian is jealous of a great premise,” he says. “What she has laid out in these first few chapters, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a great f*cking premise.’”
Natalie struggles balancing her real life and what her audiences expect from her, something Minhaj is all too familiar with. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand that what I do is entertaining. At the very least, I need to deliver laughs and entertainment X many times per minute,” he says. “If it’s done at its best, it can be both entertaining and edifying. It can uplift as well… but it’s not salvation in and of itself.”
He continues: “There are certain conversations that I can try to communicate by Rode mic or through a 50-millimeter lens or an 85, but fundamentally I’m trapped by Avid, the editing software. It is an edit. It is a cut.”
Watch the full episode below:
