Last week, Hillary Clinton released "What Happened", a new book detailing her defeat to Donald Trump in last November's presidential election. Clinton holds little back in describing how she lost one of the most divisive and tumultuous American elections in history. Whether it becomes one of the all-time greatest campaign memoirs will be up for the readers to decide. When it comes to political books in general, however, many readers tend to struggle according to research conducted by website 538.
Even though they were not able to track down information specific to reading, 538 did manage to find some data from Audiobooks.com showing listening rates for memoirs penned by presidential candidates since 2000. The following infographic shows a selection of the most notable books, illustrating the ones readers were able to stick with and the books they just gave up on. The average listener completed three-quarters of John McCain's "Faith of My Fathers", though the book focuses more on the military history of the McCain family, as well as his time spent as a POW in North Vietnam rather than politics.
"American Dreams" by Marco Rubio also recorded an impressive completion percentage, along with two titles by George W. Bush - "41" and "Decision Points". Hillary Clinton's "Hard Choices" does lag behind but it has to be pointed out that the audiobook version of the title is extremely long at nearly 28 hours. It was also the book people spent the most time listening to after "Decision Points", despite its lower rate of completion.
The Most Loved And Loathed Political Books
Literature
Description
This chart shows the share of selected politicians' audiobooks completed by listeners on average
