Like last year, 2025 was another light reading year for me. I echo the same thing I wrote last year: I read fewer "fun" books, but more words than ever before in 2025. However, my law books were still fun to read, especially my textbooks and supplemental materials for Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Statutes and Regulations.

I started the year finishing No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is one of my favorite history authors because she has a unique ability to bring subjects of her works to life. I think this is because she spends time exploring the side characters in many of their lives—like Joe Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt’s good friend. When you understand not just the main subject, but the people that subject interacted with, the page comes to life.

Sadly, I didn’t pick up another fun book until my Spring semester ended. But the book I jumped to first was well worth the wait. In 2024, I read the first two books of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I wasn’t able to finish the rest of the series because school started, so I thought picking up where I left off after my first year was the best thing to do. Thus, I read the largest volume of the series, Master of the Senate and was enthralled. Lyndon Johnson figured out how the Senate works, and he figured out he could work the Senate. There are countless stories of Johnson’s logrolling and political maneuverers that helped me see the current Congress in a different light. The final couple hundred pages tells the most dramatic story of Johnson trying to balance the line between not upsetting the North over the South’s position on racial segregation while not upsetting the South’s support of him as a presidential candidate because of his stance on racial segregation. Caro does an incredible job of making you wonder: was Johnson a supporter of Civil Rights because he truly believed that was right, or because he wanted to become President? There are parts of his story that indicate both could be true, such as his time spent teaching and transforming a small school in Cotulla. It would not do the book justice to attempt to summarize everything here. If you read one book, one book at all, it should be Master of the Senate.

Then, I picked up the last volume in the series (so far, as Caro is working on the fifth and final volume) and loved the time Caro spent comparing Johnson and Kennedy. The two could not have been more different in their upbringing, their outlook on life, or their political strategies, which made it all the more interesting. I thought the book would end with Kennedy’s assassination, and the final volume would tell the story of his presidency. But Kennedy’s assassination came around the middle of the book and ended when Johnson started to run for President in order to be elected outright. The remainder of the book documents Johnson’s struggle with being one of the most powerful people in the country as the Senate Majority Leader and one of the least powerful people in the country as the vice president. Johnson mourned what he had; he attempted to maintain his hand in the Senate and the Democratic party, but to no avail.

One of my favorite ways to choose my next book is to chainsmoke, and since I loved The Passage of Power, and it quoted Death of a President by William Manchester so much, I read that next. I was excited to read more of Manchester after reading his incredible series on Winston Churchill in 2024.

I started school in August and swapped my fun books for textbooks. But that was fine by me, for I took two of my favorite classes of my entire law school career so far: Constitutional Law and Administrative Law.

While I don’t really prefer to read books on my Kindle, doing so seems to be the only way I can stay on top of my fun books throughout the semester because I can usually read before bed. Thus, I was able to work through Ruth Bader Ginsburg throughout the semester. She lived an extraordinary life and was interesting to read her personal thoughts on cases she worked on while with the ACLU like Reed and Fronterio, and then read those same cases in class.

Justice Anthony Kennedy taught at my law school before he was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and he came to my law school for a lecture to promote his new book. Thus, I got a copy of that and read it. Something that happened during Ginsburg’s biography happened with reading Justice Kennedy’s—I read his reflections on Obergefell while reading and talking about it in class.

David McCullough—my favorite author—passed away a few years ago. However, this year, his daughter published a book that contained a selection of his speeches and various writings published in outlets. It was called History Matters, and if there is one thing I’ve learned in law school, especially with the current Supreme Court and its adoption of Originalism as a preferred constitutional theory of interpretation, it’s that history does matter. This was a fun little read.

McCullough, in various speeches and writings, made reference to Herman Wouk. It was clear that McCullough loved Wouk, and so I wanted to read him. McCullough said Wouk’s The Winds of War helped McCullough get through working a boring job one summer, and so I read that on Kindle, too. Reading some historical fiction was a good way to wind down at the end of the day. IN fact, when the semester ended and I had more free time, I picked up the hard copy of this book and tore through both volumes. It was incredible.

I also read another Supreme Court Justice’s memoir: Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Listening to the Law. If I had to pick between Justice Kennedy and Justice Barrett’s in terms of interesting tidbits regarding the Court, I would choose Justice Barrett’s. She included a lot of unique behind the scenes details from her time clerking for Justice Scalia and included many intellectual tidbits on originalism and even the major questions doctrine, something I am very interested in.

My first stop after taking my last final of the semester was Barnes and Noble, where I picked up The Pioneers by David McCullough. It was fantastic.

I then picked up James Madison by Richard Brookhiser, a biography of the book’s namesake. This is my first biography of James Madison but I was interested in learning more about him after taking Constitutional Law and his notes from the Constitutional Convention being cited so often my scholars and the Court. It’s very good, but short. It comes in at just around 250 pages, so it is certainly not as in-depth as Hamilton or John Adams is, but that is kind of nice. I saw it was highly recommended by The Best Presidential Bios website (one of my favorites) and I thought it would be a good primer. Ralph Kethcham’s biography of the fourth president seems to be the best, so perhaps I’ll tackle that one next.