Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton released "What Happened," her new book chronicling her defeat to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Clinton holds little back in describing how she lost one of the most tumultuous and divisive elections in American history. Whether it becomes one of the truly great campaign memoirs remains for the readers to decide. When it comes to books written by politicians in general, some people tend to struggle if research conducted by website 538 is anything to go by.
While no information specific to reading was available, Audiobooks.com was able to supply listening data for various memoirs by presidential candidates. The following infographic shows a selection of the books listeners are most likely to give up on as well as the ones they tend to stick with. The average listener completed three-quarters of John McCain's "Faith of My Fathers," though the book focuses more on his family's military history as well as his time spent as a POW after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam than politics.
Marco Rubio's "American Dreams" also had a high completion percentage, along with George W. Bush's "41" and "Decision Points." Even though Hillary Clinton's "Hard Choices" lags behind, it must be pointed out that the audiobook is extremely long at just under 28 hours. After "Decision Points," it was also the book people spent the most time listening to, despite its lower completion rate.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
