Via FiveThiryEight – Politicians Write Lots Of Books. Here’s How Far Into Them People Read: “…here are two ways to slice this data. First, you can look at the percentage of the book the average listener played (the second column from the right). The average reader made it through three-quarters of “Faith of My Fathers” by John McCain. That’s ridiculously high. Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee all had average completion percentages, between 65 and 70 percent, for “American Dreams,” “Unintimidated,” and “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” respectively. The books that don’t do so well by this measure come from both sides of the aisle, but they do have one thing in common: They’re looooong. So the other way to gauge who’s written the most engaging political books is to look at how much time listeners are spending with them. (The right-most column.) We can use the average amount of time spent listening to a book — completion percentage multiplied by book length — which doesn’t penalize books for being lengthier. In this case, “Decision Points,” the presidential memoir by President George W. Bush, “Hard Choices,” the 2014 memoir by Hillary Clinton, and “A Time for Truth” by Ted Cruz come out looking very good. It turns out that people are willing to listen to Bush, Clinton and Cruz speak uninterrupted for many more hours than I expected…”