How Usha Vance promotes reading as a tool for growth and leadership

The Second Lady of the US , Usha Vance, has quietly turned reading into her secret weapon, and it’s worth paying attention.

Usha’s love for books didn’t just develop, it was baked into her childhood. Her Chennai-based aunt fondly remembers sending her Tagore collections, Malgudi Days, and mythological gems from India, because Usha was an insatiable reader even as a kid. “She is a voracious reader … loved reading all of them and would ask me to send her more from India,” she shared. Picture a young Usha surrounded by stories, training her mind to travel across time and cultures. This wasn’t just a hobby, it was a way of seeing and building bridges.

On International Literacy Day, Vance took to Instagram to wish everyone. She also mentioned about the Summer Reading Challenge and shared a few pictures of the event. "Happy International Literacy Day! The Summer Reading Challenge might be over, but the magic of reading continues—dive into a new story today!," she posted on Instagram.

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Fast forward to today: amid politics, public life, and security details, Usha uses reading as her anchor. Glimpses of her in the serene, green library of the Naval Observatory, paperbacks in hand, fireplace glowing, drowning out the chaos of headlines and cameras have been caught. “One of the ways to counteract [this world] is to read paper books,” she told The Free Press. And in her rare media appearances, she’s refreshingly real. In a chat with Free Press, she admitted her highest priority right now is "to be actually a normal person." No frills. Just real life, grounded in turning pages.

The Summer reading challenge
Here’s where things get exciting, Usha launched the 2025 Summer Reading Challenge, inviting kids from kindergarten to Grade 8 to read 12 books between June 1 and September 5. It’s simple: read any books that excite you, log them, reflect via a drawing or note, and send it in for a certificate, small prize, and a shot at winning a trip to Washington, D.C.! Her message is heartfelt: “Adventure, imagination, and discovery await—right between the pages of a book!” What’s especially cool is that Usha frames it as a small step in counteracting bigger problems like declining reading scores and summer learning loss. “This isn’t everything, but it’s a good start,” she told Heczo.

But she didn’t stop at launching it online. Usha took the challenge on the road, visiting military families at Camp Pendleton, reading stories to kids, and handing out personalized bookmarks. In Georgia, she stopped by Cherokee Classical Academy, read “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and interacted with fourth to sixth graders, all in support of the challenge.

Why it matters: Books as leadership fuel
Think of reading not just as literacy, but as leadership boot camp. From Usha’s perspective, it’s noticeable: she spoke about how constant distractions, phones, pings, notifications, crowd out the beautiful power of sustained, reflective thought. Like marveling at the Taj Mahal, she said, “What is very special about being a human is that we have this capacity for sustained thought and reflection.”

Her “reading as antidote” philosophy is deliberate: engaging with ideas, especially through books, sparks curiosity that can lead into learning, creativity, and leadership.

Whether she’s quietly reading in a room off-camera or encouraging a kid in rural America to pick up their first summer book, Usha is planting seeds, for empathy, for imagination, and for the kind of leadership that comes from well-nourished curiosity.

So here’s the thing: Usha Vance isn’t out there with flashy megaphones or grand initiatives. Instead, she’s gently reminded us that growth and leadership can begin with picking up a book. She’s being normal, real, but in that normalcy, she’s wielding soft and meaningful power.

She’s a kid in Chennai who never stopped asking for more stories, now extending that curiosity to a nation of young readers. She’s someone who, when met with distractions and spectacle, chose paper books and quiet reflection. And she's someone rolling out a reading challenge that could very well create readers who become thinkers and leaders.