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Books Make an Impression:
An Interview with Mary Solberg Michelle Twait
Recently I sat down with Mary Solberg, associate professor of religion and frequent library user, to talk about books, reading, and libraries. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
MT: How have libraries played a role in your life?
MS: Well, my father taught history at a church-related college and so the academic and intellectual life was always a big part of my family. There were always a lot of books visible in my home… I ate books alive as a kid. Part of it was because we didn’t have a TV until I was nine and part of it, I’m sure, was that both of my parents were avid readers. There were a couple of things in grade school that I remember very vividly. One was… my fifth-grade teacher, one of the things I loved about her was that she read aloud to us. I think it was right after lunch for maybe a half an hour. I mean, it never was long enough. I remember going to the grade school library. It was an old, old one-story brick school and there was a very long counter all the way across the width of the school and behind that were all the stacks…
I remember taking four to six books home every week. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Isn’t it great? I’m never going to run out of books to read. There’s always going to be more books to read than I’m going to have time to read. And they are always going to be ahead of me.’ Of course now I just wish they’d stop publishing books for about five years so I could catch up! [laughs] I loved reading biographies and I read about Florence Nightingale and Kit Carson and Daniel Boone and Amelia Earhart. I think I was trying to figure out who I was going to be. I loved books, just loved books.
MT: … I’ve worked with you on [library] sessions [ranging] from your First Term Seminar on Joan of Arc to, most recently, your senior thesis students. How do you view the role of library research in your courses?
MS: I’m really concerned that students get some level of practice reading and using libraries. I really don’t think people get very much of that in school – middle school or high school… [Some students only have exposure to] the banking method – where you learn what the teacher thinks you should know and you are evaluated based on how much of that you can reproduce. Then, suddenly, if you go to college, you’re expected… at least nominally, to start thinking for yourself and you’ve had no practice doing that.
But there’s also been no association between what you could find out that might be different from what the teacher would know. And I am somewhat romantic in the sense that I really think it’s wonderful to be in a library and to hold books and wander through the stacks and all that stuff. But I think there is a great deal that is not just the good old days or romance about reading a book, holding a book, casting your eyeballs across the page, turning the pages, putting it down, thinking about it. Seeing all the books, imagining how many people have thought about how many things. It’s… more difficult to develop that disposition, that awareness, if you don’t have the practice of spending time in a library.
Getting students into a library is obviously for me the first step in… helping them learn a practice that one would hope would be further developed and last a lifetime. And, really, whether it is [an] FTS or senior thesis, it’s important. It’s essential. All the way along the line.
MT: To switch gears, or perhaps not, what books have had the greatest impact on you?
MS: The whole series of The Stupids…they are really funny books. I would say the books that I mentioned when we first started talking, that I read when I was a child, had a very, very profound impact on me. Partly just the fact that they were the books I read and that I loved reading. Partly because I had a chance to go so many places through books. I really wanted to know who I was supposed to be and what I could be. Because my parents told me that I could do anything I wanted to and once I got to junior high school, I realized that there were things that girls couldn’t do. Not because anyone told me that, but because it seemed perfectly evident from my experience of physical education and mathematics and things like that. Very clear messages were sent. But it was so wonderful to read these biographies, because these were very specific people who did very specific and important things. So those books, collectively, mattered to me a lot.
I’ve had a top ten list of novels and I don’t know how important any one or any collection of them would have been, but I think of books like The Brothers Karamazov, Portrait of a Lady, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Beloved. You know I say Beloved and I think, that book just moved me so much. I think it was the first time I ever really saw with my heart what slavery must have been like. It was just astonishing to me that [Toni Morrison] could bring that to life…just the power of the story and the way it was told. And now what I’m discovering is reading Hebrew texts. Hearing the translation of the Hebrew and knowing enough of the Hebrew to be dangerous, you know. [laughs] To see that the translation is really what those words are saying because I know enough about the words to know that’s what they’re saying. It’s just so moving. So powerful. Hearing something read in another language that you’ve heard read in English.
MT: So what you’re reading now is…
MS: Well, every once in a while I’ll go to Barnes and Noble and grade papers and I’ll putz around and I’ll find a book that looks just really wonderful and it turns out that these books often are connected to things I’m thinking about or teaching. In the last three or four months, I read a book by Elaine Pagels called Beyond Belief, which is about the very first couple of centuries of the Christian movement. Then maybe six weeks ago, I picked up a book called The Doctors’ Plague because I teach Ethics and Medicine. I’m going to take a book with me to Atlanta for [a] conference. It’s a book by Steven Pinker and it’s [called The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature]… One of the things I want to think about very deeply… is human nature. Whether we have the capacity to do what is right consistently. So I’m very interested to see what this neuroscientist has to say about human nature.
…[Now] I go much more specifically to books that will help me figure something out, but it’s the same thread that goes back to when I was a little girl and I read biographies because I wanted to know who I could be. I wanted to go somewhere else and see it from another angle. I was kind of working on the general problem then and now…there are things I really want to know more about and I want to see how somebody else has thought about it and so I find books specifically that will help me do that.
MT: Are there things I’ve forgotten to ask or other things you want to mention?
MS: I’m sure I probably told you much more than you wanted to know! [laughs] I hope that libraries will be around for centuries more. I hope that libraries and books, physical books, are not displaced and not, as I say, not for romantic reasons, so much as for the kind of weightiness. Not that the books are heavy…but this is like evidence. This is the evidence of awfulness, of adventure, of great lives…and there’s something just very impressive…it makes an impression.
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