What are you reading?

I read either mystery stories or novels by James Patterson, looking to kind of escape my own reality. So right now I'm reading "The Quickie," which is his latest murder mystery. On a more everyday basis ... I read ... what my children read, and so I'm reading all the Jack and Annie's "Magic Tree House" books, by Mary Pope Osborne, with my third-grader; we read every night. And with my middle-schooler, we just finished "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. It's about growing up in the Japanese internment camps.

What keeps you coming back to Patterson?

I like his characters, generally. The other book of his I just read was "Mary, Mary," and Alex Cross is his detective. He's a good writer, enough detail but not too much that it slows the reading down. I like it because you can get really immersed in it, but then if you asked me a week later to recall the details, I couldn't because it's done and pau and I've moved on.

Do your reading habits mirror your work for Sen. Inouye — focusing thoroughly on each issue but then keep moving forward?

Yes, because that is part of my job — just getting really focused on an issue and then moving on. ... So that's part of it, but it also gives me a check-out on reality. A lot of the best-sellers are the Obama books or the Clinton books, which are a bit too close to what I do everyday, so I would consider those too much like work. So when I'm reading a Grisham or Patterson book, I can just enjoy it and then I'm done.