Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This was the most ambitious reading I've done in 2016.

Team of Rivals is a 754 page book. I checked it out from the library mistakenly thinking that I could renew it twice, and that would give me nine weeks to finish it. No problem!

Well, four days before the first due date, I tried to renew it, and whoops, there was a hold on it so I couldn't renew. I had read 120 pages. 634 pages to go.

I wanted to finish it because this was a couple of weeks after the presidential election here in the United States. I was finding so many parallels and differences between the politics and leadership of Lincoln and what is going on here right now.

So I went into turbo reading mode. Yes, I pounded out 634 pages in four days. And this was not easy Nicholas Sparks on the beach reading. This was heavy, dense history reading.

Yes, heavy and dense, but so intriguing! Lincoln appointed all of his rivals to his cabinet because he wanted the best and brightest and smartest men leading and serving the country with him. He did what he thought was best for the country. These were not men who had been loyal to him or supportive of him. But they were the smartest, and so Lincoln wanted to be surrounded by them.

I learned so much about Lincoln and the nuances and the human costs of the Civil War.

Highly recommended if you're interested in Lincoln, the Civil War, or tired of hearing about politics in the US (isn't that all of us?).