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Usha Vance is a closed book – but her Goodreads account is surprisingly revealing | Arwa Mahdawi

Usha Vance is a closed book – but her Goodreads account is surprisingly revealing | Arwa Mahdawi

theguardian.com 21.10.2026 12:00 3 views
From Roman-era political potboilers to stories of Catholic priests struggling to impose their authority, what could the reading list of vice-president JD Vance’s wife be trying to tell us?Usha Vance, a very clever woman

Usha Vance, a very clever woman with dubious taste in men, likes to keep herself busy. While lesser mortals (me) waste their one wild and precious life watching Love Is Blind, the second lady has various self-improvement projects on the go. She’s brushing up on her German!

She’s hosting a literacy podcast! She’s rereading the classics! And, of course, she’s juggling four young children and the demands of being the vice-president’s spouse.

With the help of taxpayer dollars, I suspect. Easier to get some reading done when you’re being helicoptered everywhere and, as JD Vance has boasted: “People go to the grocery store for me.” But I’m not here to moan about how much the Vance family is costing the taxpayer. I am here to share an important, and only slightly unhinged, theory.

The second lady is notoriously private; people are constantly trying to understand what she’s thinking. Now, I think I’ve figured it out. While Usha herself is not an open book, I reckon her bookshelf – or, rather, her Goodreads account – is trying to tell us something.

Either that or she’s trolling us. Remember, for example, when JD was trying to mansplain Catholicism to the pope back in April? (Pope Leo XIV, to be clear; pope Francis died the year before, one day after meeting Vance.) As all that was happening, Usha picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Which, to be wildly simplistic, is a book about a French missionary priest tasked with imposing order and Catholic norms on a church in New Mexico, where some other naughty priests have gone a bit rogue.

Make of that what you will. Then there’s all the recent chatter about whether JD Vance is going to be Trump’s heir. Per her Goodreads account, Usha has just finished reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves.

Extract — continue reading at the source.

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