Cory Booker's secret to long-distance romance: a book at bedtime

Based on his standing in the presidential primary polls, voters don’t seem especially interested in Cory Booker’s policies. His personal life is another story. That’s due in large part to Booker’s relationship with the actor and activist Rosario Dawson, who shared details of their lives together in a recent profile in the Washington Post.

“They are the rare power couple capable of fascinating political analysts, Hollywood gossips and your mother,” the Post writes.

While the duo’s schedules, particularly with Booker on the campaign trail, don’t often overlap – “Maybe we can meet at the airport hotel,” he jokes in the piece – they’ve managed to make things work with a consistent routine of FaceTime, they explained.

Booker sends her music to listen to every morning, and of late they’ve taken to reading books aloud to each other over the phone.

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“Dawson says they went two months without seeing each other. But they’ve made up for it with FaceTime, which they try to do twice a day,” the Post writes. “He’s gotten in the habit of sending her music every morning, and he just finished reading David Benioff’s World War II novel City of Thieves to her over the phone.”

The book by Benioff, better known as the showrunner of Game of Thrones, is a piece of historical fiction about the siege of Leningrad during the second world war. City of Thieves is a coming-of-age story – as the Guardian described it upon its release in 2008: “Lev, a 17-year-old, chess-playing virgin, and Kolya, a charismatic ladies’ man, are given five days by a Red Army colonel to find a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. Their road trip into a landscape gripped by near-starvation glints with heart-stopping sights.”

At 258 pages long, Benioff’s novel would amount to a lot of hours spent reading on FaceTime.

“Cory Booker is an Audiobook Boyfriend,” the Cut declared after the Post interview was published. Reading over long distances seems to be a favorite move of his. Booker told a similar story to the New York Times about reading The Lovely Bones over the phone with a previous girlfriend.

“I was in a long-distance relationship, and my girlfriend decided we should read books together, so she chose first,” Booker told the Times. “I was not happy about her choice at first and tried to dissuade her.”

However, as Booker and his girlfriend read aloud to each other over the phone, he learned to love Alice Sebold’s bestselling 2002 novel, which was adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon in 2009.

“It was a beautiful, emotionally fulfilling book that I recommended to many, many others after I read it.”