Usha Vance, the spouse of Ohio Senator and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, is a committed bookworm who hasn’t let the hectic demands of a national campaign get in the way of her literary proclivity, according to an NBC News report.
Vance quit her job as an attorney at the high powered law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson when her husband was tapped by former president Donald Trump as his running mate in July. She has since has toured the country non-stop alongside JD, but admirably hasn’t quit the joy of reading.
The reserved Vance keeps a much lower profile than the other spouses of candidates on the major party presidential tickets, NBC noted reporters have observed her holding copies of Daniel Mason’s 2023 historical fiction North Woods and Tana French’s 2007 mystery novel In the Woods while boarding and disembarking from the campaign plane in recent months.
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Vance was so committed to Anthony Doerr’s acclaimed 2021 speculative fiction novel Cloud Cuckoo Land that, while enjoying a pause on a Florida tarmac in September, she balanced a hardcover on her left arm while the engine fans of the plane blew at the pages and kept on reading, NBC reported.
An image of Vance exiting a campaign plane in July shows her clutching a copy of Alf Wight’s All Creatures Great and Small, an omnibus of the British veterinary surgeon’s first two novels written under the pseudonym James Herriot.
But the book that has accompanied Vance the most, from Pennsylvania to California, has been a 2023 translation of Homer’s The Iliad by classicist Emily Wilson.
“That’s because our now seven-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” Vance told NBC. “He picked up a child’s version of The Odyssey and then The Iliad and all these other things and became completely obsessed. So to keep up with him, I decided it was time to pick The Iliad up myself.”
Vance, who studied history at Yale and Cambridge before meeting her husband at law school, has a dormant Goodreads account, last updated in 2016.
Because of the site’s five star rating system, her profile offers a deeper glimpse into the books she found torturous and those she found revelatory.
Awarded a mere one star, Vance appeared to have particular ire for Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Erskine Childers' early spy novel The Riddle of the Sands.
Her account last rated a book in May 2016, her husband’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
It received five stars, putting JD’s work—in Vance’s estimation, at least—in the company of Nabokov’s Lolita, Raymond Carter’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
