Glenn Garvin on the Unbearable Awfulness of Campaign Lit

From Reason's August/September issue, Glenn Garvin reads seven 2016 president wannabes' books so you don't have to. From Ben Carson to Mike Huckabee to Hillary Clinton, the results are not pretty:

Having read—God help me—precisely 2,026 pages of this stuff, I can tell you that no sane person would pay nine cents a page for it. But more surprising than the price it commands is that the genre exists at all. In an age when even the old and much-despised 30-second TV soundbite is considered windy, when all political thought must fit into the confines of a 140-character tweet, it seems quixotic and even mildly deranged that candidates spend time committing tens of thousands of words onto the corpses of slaughtered trees. Even Carly Fiorina's Rising to the Challenge, with barely 188 pages of wide margins and big type when you subtract out the index and acknowledgements, weighs in at around 46,000 words.