What book is on your night stand now?

Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child,” Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,”  “The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It” (Library of America). I always seem to be reading several books at once.

Where and when do you like to read?

Everywhere and anywhere — but always at night before I go to sleep.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Not having read “Huckleberry Finn” since high school, I returned to it last summer — ordering it on my Kindle on a bit of a whim. I was astonished to find how much of what I had been teaching and studying about race and slavery in American history was already there in a book published in 1884. The book offers as well striking — and eerily modern, or perhaps postmodern in their critical renderings of “reality” — insights into the masks and dissimulations that structure social order....