Usha Vance's expansive reading list gives a glimpse of a private figure in the campaign
As Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance campaigns across the country, his wife, Usha Vance, has been a near-constant presence by his side.
As Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance campaigns across the country, his wife, Usha Vance, has been a near-constant presence by his side. In the final weeks of the campaign, she has traveled with her own regular companion: a copy of “The Iliad."
Her edition of the Greek epic — a celebrated 800-page translation from 2023 by University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson — has accompanied Vance across the country, briefly visible as she has boarded and exited campaign planes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado and California.
“That's because our now 7-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” Vance said in a rare phone interview. “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.”
The volume is just one piece of a larger, growing library of books she has torn through in three months on the campaign trail, the dust covers visible to reporters on airport tarmacs around the country.
Early in her time on the trail, she traveled with Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” a story that follows the inhabitants of a single New England house from colonial America to the present day. American Irish author Tana French’s “In the Woods” came along for at least two separate trips, including a day trip to southwestern Virginia to survey storm damage in the days after Hurricane Helene tore through the region.
Rating: 5