While reading Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton's memoir about her time as secretary of state, I got a lot done. I scoured my computer for duplicate files and erased dozens of gigabytes of redundant information. I cleaned and reorganized all the music in my iTunes folder. I sent about 10 e-mails I had been meaning to get around to for ages. I was feeling productive, but I wasn't making any progress in the book. I expected it to take me about three days to read—it took a week. Eventually, it dawned on me that I was doing anything in my power to avoid reading Hard Choices, because Hard Choices is a book without suspense, a narrative that leaves you with absolutely no desire to turn the page.
I certainly don't think Clinton is a boring person; she's one of the most interesting figures in modern American politics. And I don't think the time she spent in office as secretary of state was dull. Nor do I have any doubt that she could write an interesting book about her time as secretary of state. Hard Choices is just not that book, because Hard Choices is obviously a mechanism to promote Clinton's 2016 run for president. These campaign-ready books, especially from figures like Clinton who need no introduction to the general public, are intended to address as many issues as possible in the blandest language possible. That way, when a Benghazi-addled Republican heckles Clinton at her thirtieth Iowa steak fry, she can simply tell the howling white moron to read her book, which addresses many pages to the matter. Case closed. It's a useful trick, but it makes for one of the most dreadful reading experiences I've had in recent memory.
I suppose if you need a crash course in the current state of geopolitics, Hard Choices could be the (impossibly bland) textbook for you. It's arranged by region rather than in strict chronological order, and most chapters begin with Clinton's brief, cliché-addled debriefings for the part of world she's about to discuss. (Did you know that China is "full of contradictions," for example?) Sometimes, Clinton displays a substitute teacher's stiff attempts at a loose conversational tone: "Here's a question whose answer may surprise you: What part of the world is the destination for more than 40 percent of all US exports?... In fact the two largest single destinations for our exports are our closest neighbors: Canada and Mexico." And more importantly, these passages do the essential sucking up to our allies that every major presidential candidate has to do:
Even amid all the history and traditions, [Jerusalem] was a city pulsing with life and energy. And I deeply admired the talent and tenacity of the Israeli people. They had made the desert bloom and built a thriving democracy in a region full of adversaries and autocrats.
Progressive Democrats are not going to find any hints that Clinton in 2016 will be any less hawkish than she was in 2008. In the book's first few pages, Clinton praises monstrous war criminal Henry Kissinger, who should be rotting to death in prison for his crimes against humanity, for making "astute observations about foreign leaders." Later, when Clinton discusses her diplomatic triumph in Burma, she tries to get personal with an anecdote: "I have joked with Henry that he was lucky there were no smartphones or social media when he made his first secret trip to Beijing. Imagine if a Secretary tried to do that today." Hilarious! The passage where Clinton asked Kissinger about the genocide in Bangladesh or the mass murders in Timor that he and President Nixon permitted to happen must not have survived the editing process.
Clinton also supports the use of drones to assassinate targets overseas ("It was widely known that dozens of senior terrorists had been taken off the battlefield, and we later learned that bin Laden himself worried about the heavy losses that drones were inflicting"), argues that Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks are in no way analogous to the Pentagon Papers (she says they disrupted "sensitive diplomatic communications"), and neatly sidesteps having to take a stand on Edward Snowden's revelations of widespread NSA wiretapping because that "happened after I left office." She does, at least, regret her vote for involvement in Iraq, saying she sought "as many opinions as I could inside and outside our government, Democrats and Republicans alike"—all those well-attended antiwar marches across the country don't get a mention here—but that ultimately, "I came to deeply regret giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on that vote."
Last week, Clinton signed copies of Hard Choices for 1,200 rabid fans at University Book Store, and the signing was, in many ways, a parallel to the experience of reading Hard Choices. It was an efficient event, and it left the true believers elated, but Clinton didn't take any questions from the press in attendance—television media wasn't even allowed to record audio at the event—and the whole thing felt sterile, promotional, and a little bit religious, like the launch day of a new iPhone model at an Apple Store.
If you're looking to read a useful, interesting book about Clinton's time as head of the US State Department, I recommend Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes's HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. If you want to read an interesting memoir by a former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright's Madam Secretary makes Hard Choices look like a tax-code textbook in comparison. But even as a campaign document, it's not very interesting. Take this paean to the American middle class, which Clinton takes the controversial stance of claiming is...
The greatest economic engine in history and the heart of the American Dream. Its success is rooted in the basic bargain that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will prosper; that if you innovate, if you create and build, there is no limit on what you can achieve. The middle class has always been defined as much if not more by the values and aspirations we share as by the goods we purchase.
It's just a brick wall of boilerplate. And when compared to the expertise, the passion, and the excitement for growing the middle class found in a memoir by another politician who recently visited University Book Store—A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren—Hard Choices feels like nothing but the same stale campaign promises we've all heard thousands of times before. 
