| The following was originally
printed in BookWomen magazine, a "Readers'
Community for Those Who Love Women's Words," published by the Center
for Feminist Reading at Minnesota Women's Press.
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Seek and ye shall find by Mollie
Hoben
Profile of a BookWomen Reader
In both her professional and reading lives, Barbara Wildemuth is on a
search for new perspectives and diverse sources of information.
Just about the time Barbara Wildemuth graduated from college in the 1970s
with her degree in music education, the financially strapped public schools
in her area laid off all the music teachers. Not a promising situation.
Wildemuth analyzed her interests beyond music and thought she’d
like to become a librarian. But first, to test her decision, she got a
job as a library clerk.
“That sold me,” she recalled. “I loved it.”
“Many people go into library work because they like reading and
talking about books they've read, and getting others to read,” she
found. “People who work in libraries are so interesting.”
Ultimately, Wildemuth ended up with a doctorate in information science
and an interest in how people search for and use information. For the
past 15 years she has taught and done research on this topic at the University
of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she is professor and associate
dean of undergraduate studies in the Information & Library Science
department.
Wildemuth, who grew up in Illinois, likes living in the South. “I’m
a feminist, so when we first considered moving here, to Jesse Helms’
home state, I was worried.” But it was a quote from Helms, ironically,
that assuaged her fears. When North Carolina was considering building
a state zoo, Helms had objected. Why build a new zoo, he asked, “when
we can just put up a wall around Chapel Hill?”
Wildemuth immediately felt better about moving to the area.
"There are a lot of strong women here," she said, "and
an active literary community." Novelists Lee Smith and Kaye Gibbons
both live and write in the area, she pointed out, as do several male writers
she respects, including Clyde Edgerton.
At her church, Wildemuth belongs to a women’s spiritual development
group that reads and discusses books together, mostly nonfiction. The
group meets weekly and may discuss one book over a period of meetings.
A recent favorite for Wildemuth was The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith
and Doubt in Southern Fiction, by Susan Ketchin, offering interviews with
southern authors, including Lee Smith, Reynolds Price and Doris Betts.
It’s a valuable book for understanding southern writing as well
as for exploring issues of faith, Wildemuth said. “If you’re
writing the South, church is going to get into it one way or another.”
Another favorite was Renita Weems’ Listening for God: A Minister’s
Journey Through Silence and Doubt. Wildemuth appreciated the way Weems
“tells about her own life honestly, but also has the big picture.
She’s talking about a period of doubt she faced, and that resonates
with those of us who go through our own periods of faith and doubt. It’s
very useful.”
In fiction, the group has read and enjoyed, among others, Anita Diamant’s
The Red Tent (“of course”) and Pope Joan: A Novel by Donna
Woolfolk Cross.
They recently tackled Paradise by Toni Morrison. It was a challenging
read, a book that many, including Wildemuth, said they might not have
finished on their own. They discussed it section by section over a number
of weeks, and they kept up a large pad of paper for tracking the different
characters and relationships.
Wildemuth said she often decides to start a book based on the first sentence.
She was bound to read “Paradise,” she said, once she read
the first line, one of the most powerful openings she’s ever come
across: “They shoot the white girl first.”
Because the group tends to be more conservative in its reading choices
than Wildemuth is, she usually has one or two other books going at the
same time. And since the group reads mostly nonfiction, “I’m
almost always reading some fiction.”
Sometimes she’ll pick up “mainstream women’s novels,”
but by and large, she’s likely to be reading something that pushes
the edges more.
When Fox Is a Thousand, by Larissa Lai, was such a novel for Wildemuth.
“It’s about a character who’s traveling through time;
you have to believe in, or at least be willing to think about, shape shifting
and reincarnation.”
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is another intriguing novel: “The
premise is you can physically enter into a book; the plot is about a bad
guy who gets hold of the machine that allows him to enter the original
manuscript and kidnap Jane Eyre. It’s fascinating and a lot of fun,
but you do have to be able to suspend disbelief.”
Wildemuth said she, like most of her colleagues in information science,
has a strong sense of curiosity. “There’s so much I’m
interested in knowing about. I can live some things, but others I’ll
never live, so I have to experience them vicariously. Books can play with
ideas and possible lives that I could never get to experience otherwise.”
Currently Wildemuth is reading—and intrigued by—Marge Piercy’s
He, She and It, a novel about a man, a woman and a robot. At a recent
information- science conference she attended a workshop on ethics in information
systems. The speaker, a professor, said he requires all his students to
read Piercy's fictional exploration of ethical questions about technology
and what it means to be human.
For her personal reading, Wildemuth is a book buyer more than a borrower.
At the same time, she’s not interested in owning many books. “I
don’t accumulate them,” she said, “and I don’t
reread them.”
If she really likes a book, she’ll keep it to loan to others, but
many of the books Wildemuth purchases end up being donated to student
organizations for their fund-raising book sales.
An active customer of the three independent bookstores in her area (“we’re
very fortunate here”), Wildemuth is passionate about the need for
readers to support independent bookstores and publishers.
“Being a person who likes who look for off- beat books, the books
that aren’t going to be big sellers, I think it’s very important
that we have independent sources,” Wildemuth said.
If all we have are the big chain booksellers, she believes, the range
of information available to consumers will be constricted. “When
I see independent stores disappearing, I’m really concerned that
we’re limiting our access to information.”
For readers who aren’t fortunate, as she is, to have independent
stores handy, Wildemuth recommends Booksense.com, the online site of independent
booksellers around the country.
With increasing government budget woes, libraries face dangers similar
to those of independent bookstores, Wildemuth warns. “High-volume
items always will get into the collections, but when resources are tight,
books that are a little different may not.”
This is especially disturbing, she said, because “Public libraries
have a responsibility that’s different than a bookstore. And they
have a special obligation to those who don’t have resources to buy
books.”
There’s a lot at stake, she believes. “In a democracy, we
count on a well-educated citizenry, with many viewpoints.” For Wildemuth,
then, her research into how people find and use information is about more
than curiosity. “If we can understand how people approach information
systems, we can design better ways for them to get the information they
need.”
More books Barbara Wildemuth has enjoyed recently:
Ghost Written, a novel by David Mitchell, involves
a spirit that moves from person to person around the world—“weird,
but interesting.”
Red Azalea, memoir by Anchee Min. “I learned
a lot about China, and I was intrigued by Min's aspiration to become an
actress, which was so differernt from anything I’d do.”
An Equal Music, novel by Vikram Seth. “Having been
a music major, I really liked it. The depiction of the musicians was so
on target, it brought back memories.”
Point Last Seen, memoir by Hannah Nyala. “She
became a professional tracker after she left her abusive husband and had
to develop strong skills to tell if he’d been around.”
Catherwood, novel by Marly Youmans, “In
upstate New York in the 1700s, a woman and her baby get lost in the wilderness
and she must figure out how to survive.”
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