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.

How does she do it all? 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. That book is about a member of Rome’s imperial family who survives vicious palace politics because everyone underestimates him. All the infighting and murder means he’s the last man standing and becomes emperor almost by accident. Is that a reflection on her husband’s political future? Perhaps! Now that Usha is done with Graves, she’s reading the nonfiction book Medieval People by Eileen Power. Perhaps to prepare for the dark ages her husband is helping drag the country back to.

“Arwa,” you might say, “you’re reading way too much into this!” Of course I am. I have a degree in English literature: that’s three years of explaining how doorknobs in Jane Austen novels represent the hollowness of colonialism. Nevertheless, I think I may be on to something. Let’s just hope that Usha’s next choice of reading material isn’t Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist