Drew Gilpin Faust interviewed in NYT

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....