Of female writers who appeal the least to the young men in my seminars, Jane Austen surely holds first place. Many of these male students can relate to the work of Annie Dillard or Anne Tyler, and more than a few over the years have taken to Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, if only because of Heathcliff and the author’s magnificently wild prose, but none of these young men have evinced, at least publicly, any interest in becoming, as have so many women, members of the Austenite cult. Even I, though I have found on several readings great treasures in Pride and Prejudice, have in the past mostly taught Austen because the book so gratifies my female students.

In his new book A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, And The Things That Really Matter (ISBN 978-1-59420-288-9, $25.95), William Deresciewicz offers a perspective that may allow men to regard Jane Austen as more than just the queen of “chick-lit.”

When Deresciewicz first introduces himself in this book, he is an immature and arrogant graduate student in literature who is forced to take a course featuring Jane Austen’s Emma, a story which at first seemed to “consist of nothing but chitchat among a group of commonplace characters in a country village.” Bored at first by Emma’s willful attempts to change the lives of those around her, Deresciewicz soon realized that Emma’s cruelty and her contempt for some of her familiars were a mirror image of his own feelings. Moreover, he understood that Austen had written about everyday things and people because “she wanted to show how important they really are.”

Emma led Deresciewicz deeper into Austen territory, first to Pride and Prejudice, and then to the others: Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. He fell so in love with the long-deceased author that he soon decided to include her in his dissertation, and found himself immersed in her life, reading biographies and poring over her correspondence.

Deresiewicz divides A Jane Austen Education into chapters devoted to each of these novels. Skillfully weaving his own stories into his criticism of Austen’s stories, he shows us how her stories and characters affected him, making him a better man. From Emma, for example, he learns how to pay closer attention to the everyday events and people that touch his life, that it truly is the little things in life that count the most. From Pride and Prejudice, and the mistakes in judgment made by Elizabeth Bennett and her revelation regarding those mistakes, Deresiewicz realizes that he himself has often let his own prejudices blind him to reality. “She (Austen) wanted us,” Deresiewicz writes, “to override our emotions, which dwell within us and urge us to do what we want, and replace them with reason — with logic, with evidence, with objectivity — which stands outside us and doesn’t care what we want.”

A Jane Austen Education is also a tale of a young man not only becoming aware of his own flaws, but of learning how to love. Here an older professor helps Deresiewicz grapple with Austen and the lessons to be learned there. From Northanger Abbey the professor quotes Catherine, a central figure in the book: “I have just learnt to love a hyacinth.” The professor points out to Deresiewicz that Catherine had learned to love the hyacinth, and as another character tells her, “Who can tell, the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose?…The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.” This, says the professor, is the central theme and lesson of Northanger Abbey.

From Sense and Sensibility Deresiewicz learns perhaps his most important lesson in the art of love, particularly as it relates to women. Austen lived at the beginning of the Romantic period, when feelings trumped reason, yet Austen herself came down firmly on the side of reason in regard to love. The head, according to Austen, trumps the heart — or at least equals it. This is not, on Austen’s part, a cold, calculating reason, but rather, a realization that we should fall in love with a person’s character more deeply than we account their looks, that “falling in love” is all too often temporary while to love someone is permanent. “Austen was not against romance,“ Deresiewicz writes. “She was against romantic mythology.“

The best love, Deresiewicz realizes from his reading of the novels, develops first in friendship, in familiarity, in an evaluation of the character of another, from which there emerges the attraction of real love. “And that was the most momentous revelation of all,” Deresiewicz writes. “Not only does your happiness depend upon your choice of mate, your very self depends upon it — your character, your soul.”

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, And The Things That Really Matter by William Deresciewicz. Penguin Press HC, 2011. 272 pages

The New Year’s resolution typically leads a short and tragic life. Its father is misdeeds, its mother remorse. Once born, the resolution swarms about its maker as irritating as a fruit fly. Often, too, it lives no longer than the common fruit fly, which is to say about two weeks. Its demise usually evokes in its pall-bearer tangled emotions of foolhardy chagrin and wild, celebratory relief.    

Growing older does occasionally mean growing wiser, and over the last few years I have abstained from making New Year’s resolutions. For most of my adult life, I had made such pledges — to quit smoking, to drink less, to lose weight, to get into shape, to listen better — and while I eventually achieved some control over these vices, my change in habits never came about as the result of a New Year’s vow.

This year is different. Let me explain why I decided to make a resolution and how I determined to carry it out. But first the resolution:

“Resolved, that I will spend 20 minutes per day for the year 2012 reading the following books: Jane Austen’s Emma; Dante’s The Divine Comedy (the John Ciardi translation); Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy; the Oresteia trilogy; the Pauline Letters of the New Testament; G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man; Caulaincourt’s With Napoleon in Russia; Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (which I have previously read, but which has long demanded another visit); Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Selected Poetry; Joseph Pearce‘s Flowers of Heaven: One Thousand Years of Christian Verse. Missed reading sessions must be made up within a week’s time.”

For more than a decade, I have vowed to read certain authors and books, writing that I had missed or neglected along the way. In my twenties, after I abandoned my graduate school studies in medieval history, I flung myself into fiction and poetry with the abandon of a man unleashed from prison, going from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, from John Donne to Sylvia Plath, from Scott Fitzgerald to Evelyn Waugh. I read these authors and many more for two reasons: I was genuinely interested in the books, and I wanted to learn to write.

By the time I entered my thirties, most of the books I was reading were newer, and by the time my forties and fifties rolled around, nearly all the books were contemporary. The classics still beckoned, and my life in a classroom has kept me in touch with older works of literature, but generally my reading has aimed, both from choice and necessity, at new works of fiction, history, and biography.

But the minutes tick away, and the old books call to me. The time has come to pay them heed. If asked why I want to have read certain books before growing infirm or dying — what difference will such reading make, really, one may ask — I have no more ready answer than the old-timer who wants to climb Everest or the grandmother who wants to run a marathon. The compulsion comes from inside the heart and defies ready analysis.  

Resolutions are effective which come with this axiom: the more specific the goal, the greater chance for success. The man who sets out to “lose weight” fails nine times out of ten. The man who resolves to lose a pound a month between January and September has a fighting chance. I therefore decided to be as exacting as possible in the construction of my own pledge to myself.

Like everyone in today’s mad-rush world, I am busy with commitments. Days often pass in a blur of teaching, writing, caring for a teenager’s wants and needs, and completing the usual necessary household duties. My plan had to take into account the exigencies of my existence while at the same time allowing for some sense of accomplishment. Twenty minutes seemed a good amount of time, an easily remembered number less imposing than half an hour and more worthy than a quarter hour. Twenty minutes a day may seem inconsequential, but it adds up to well over a hundred hours of annual reading, and I am a reasonably fast reader. Self-knowledge led me to include an alternate plan in case, whether by accident or the demands of my schedule, I did miss a session of reading. I wanted a chance to compensate for my failure.

As for the books — I could have chosen any number of other titles. But the books selected here, with the exception of Caulaincourt and Pearce, are ones that I come across again and again in my reading. Some books are included to offset omissions in my education that are just plain embarrassing: to have neglected Dante is, given my interests and education, inexcusable. Some are appropriate to my stage of life; Boethius, for example, wrote The Consolations of Philosophy while under a sentence of death, a circumstance that looms somewhat larger in my life now than it did at age 20. Hopkins I have read in bits and pieces, and wanted a more disciplined approach to his work. I have read several Greek plays, and their stark prose and bare emotions drew me toward the Oresteia. I enjoy military history, hence Thucydides and Caulaincourt. (I also want to learn more about Napoleon and nineteenth century Russia, so the Caulaincourt fits several bills). Anna Karenina appeals to me for reasons of nostalgia; I can vividly remember reading the book and thinking it the best novel I’d ever read. The time seemed ripe to repeat the experiment and see what I think now of poor doomed Anna.

One great difference between this resolution and those made earlier in life is, of course, the fact that I am announcing it in a newspaper. Pressure can shape diamonds or break boulders. We’ll see how it goes.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

About 20 years ago, the book collector’s magazine “First” published an impressive article on George Pelecanos, a new writer that was not only imminently collectable, but was (in their opinion) destined to “change the face of crime fiction.” That was the start of my admiration for Pelecanos. Quite honestly, I found the novels consistently brilliant, especially his early works like A Firing Offense, Shoedog and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go.

Many successful writers prefer to set their novels in their “signature” location: T. Jefferson Parker frequently uses Orange County, Calif.; James Lee Burke loves Louisiana; Many of Dennis Lehane’s characters are at home on the back streets of Boston; and Carl Hiassen (like the late Charles Williford) prefers Miami.

Pelecanos’ turf is Washington, D.C., and his characters move, fight, love and murder each other in the labyrinthine streets of the capital city. In fact, reading a Pelecanos novel is like taking a tour of D.C.’s nightclubs and restaurants while Spero Lucas does a running commentary on the city’s polyglot cuisine, music and crime as he rides his bicycle from Dupont Circle down Georgia Avenue.

However, Spero is a unique creation. Home from Iraq with a lot of bad memories, he quickly becomes a successful cop, but he has what could be described as an unstable “moral compass.” He frequently finds that he has little patience with a spectrum of petty crimes — marijuana (Spero smokes pot himself) and prostitution seem irrelevant in a city filled with violence and mayhem. Due to his training, Spero can kill with speed and efficiency.  In addition, he is never troubled with guilt or misgivings since he only kills people who are intent on killing him.

Oddly enough, Spero is a devoted son who spends generous amounts of time with his Greek family, especially his brother Le, who is a school teacher. Still distraught over his father’s death, he makes frequent trips to the cemetery to deliver flowers. There is also a host of relatives and neighbors that are a vital part of Spero’s life -— relationships that this hardened cop values.

When the narrative of The Cut moves abruptly from Spero, the mindful son who engages in affectionate repartee with his brother, to Spero, the unemotional killer (his hands are truly lethal weapons and his ability to utilize fire arms is awesome), the transition is unnerving. Perhaps what is most troubling is Spero does not hesitate to violate the very laws he has sworn to enforce ... if the need arises.

Consider the significance of the title. The Cut refers to Spero’s portion of an illegal activity. Spero agrees to enter into an agreement with Anwan Hawkins, a known trafficker of marijuana, who has developed an inventive way to transport his product: He simply mails it by FedEx to an address where he knows the resident will not be home. Then, the party purchasing the marijuana arrives with a van and hauls the delivery away ... usually within minutes of delivery. The resident never knows that his address has been used. A problem arises when “someone” arrives and picks up the package (worth about $130,000) and drives away. Anwan asks Spero to find out who is stealing his pot. Spero readily agrees since he has no moral qualms about trafficking in marijuana anyway.  His “cut” will be 30 percent of the marijuana’s value ($50,000).

Why does Spero do it? That is a good question and I’m not sure Pelecanos provides us with an answer. Perhaps it is his expensive lifestyle, since he is part of what appears to be a kind of D. C. “cult” about dress: Spero wears Carhartt clothing and Wolverine boots. Every item (shirts, watches, automobiles) is selected for the prestige of the brand name. Spero loves good food and music. Many of the juveniles that Spero encounters conform to the same “cult” — some even wearing clothing with highly visible price tags and brand names. Tastes in music and sports are regulated in the same manner.

However, the problem in The Cut is more serious than FedEx pot and clothing styles. Two amiable young men, Tavon Lynch and Avon Davis, have the highly profitable job of picking up the FedEx packages for Anwan Hawkins and allegedly find that someone had beat them to it.

When Tavon and Avon are murdered, Spero suddenly finds that he is no longer a part of a questionable activity involving stolen pot. The stakes are suddenly much higher, and Spero’s investigation brings him into conflict with a crime figure (who is a former policeman) known as Rooster Holley, a repugnant man who has surrounded himself with a half-dozen assassins. When the situation escalates, Spero intuitively knows that not only is his life at risk, but also the lives of his family and even his neighbors. His warfare background tells him that not only must he strike first, but that his enemies must be totally eradicated.

In many ways, The Cut is a disturbing book — not because of the violence and brutality depicted, but because of “the message.” Spero can dispatch a would-be assassin with his hands. He can acquire illegal firearms (with serial numbers removed), slaughter a half dozen vicious criminals, and then throw all of the guns into a river ... just like a criminal would do. If need be, he calls “friends” to assist him — men who bear the scars of warfare, but will guard Spero’s back in the same manner that they would have do so in Iraq or Vietnam. Spero is subject to “urges” ... a compulsive need to complete grueling physical exercise (a 25-mile bike trip), to have sex, or to confront a force that threatens his family. There are times when his behavior resembles that of a predator rather than an investigator. He knows how to move quietly in the dark.

To me, the problem is the uncertain wavering of Spero’s “moral compass.” Is it possible that our most effective defenders — those who stand between us and chaos — are men who are very similar to those who threaten us? I am reminded of James Elroy’s novels that often conclude by revealing that the only difference between the cops and the criminals are the uniforms. Should our anxiety be relieved by the fact that Spero is not a total brute? He is capable of love, compassion and loyalty. He is, undeniably on our side. Is that enough? Should we admire him?

The Cut by George Pelecanos. Little, Brown & Company, 2011. 292 pages

(Gary Carden is a writer and storyteller who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Although Americans are known for their wandering ways, traveling to California in Conestoga wagons, taking the train to find a place in Broadway’s spotlight, many also retain in their hearts a deep affection for a particular place. Whether that place is a Chicago parish or Mayberry RFD is immaterial. It is this beloved place to which we compare all the other cities and landscapes of our lives, this place which haunts, for better or worse, our memories, this place whose very name is a tsunami, a massive wave swamping us in a thousand names, faces, and events from a past as much imagined as it is real.

Boonville in the Yadkin Valley of Piedmont, North Carolina is my place. Though I only lived in that small town of 600 souls for less than eight years (by comparison I have lived four times as long in these mountains), it is the Boonville of my childhood which haunts my memories, which irrevocably stamped my personality. Say the word home, and the word Boonville floats up in my mind like one of those eight-ball answers.

Allen Paul Speer’s From Banner Elk to Boonville: The Voices Trilogy: Part III (Overmountain Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-57072-329-2, $14.95) recreates the beauty and the enchantment of Boonville and the Yadkin Valley for the general reader (A caveat and a confession: Allen Speer was my friend during my Boonville adolescence, and remains a dear friend today). Comparing favorably Boonville and its environs to Tolkien’s Shire, Speer writes that “here are some of the words that best describe Yadkinians: practical, helpful, God-fearing, industrious, static, suspicious, confident, and reluctant to stir things up.”

By virtue of example rather than by such definitions, Speer also makes it clear that Yadkinians — a word of Speer’s creation, I suspect — also love storytelling. From Banner Elk to Boonville as well as the earlier two books in this trilogy — Voices From Cemetery Hill, which tells the story of Boonville’s Civil War era, and Sisters of Providence, which also tells that story from the viewpoint of the well-educated Speer women — revel in telling stories. There, for example, is the tale of the Halloween prank when a tractor was mysteriously gotten into the lobby of Boonville school (I was there, and saw it, and to this day marvel at the high school boys who pulled this one off); the stories of various Speer ancestors and townspeople; the coming of the Stammettis, owners of the Astoria Braid Mill who considerably livened up Boonville’s party life; the antics of people with nicknames like Nut, Roach, Marron, and Mouse.

Not all of From Banner Elk to Boonville is sunshine and roses. Speer shares the details of his battle against leukemia, a slow-acting lupus which he has fought for many years now. He also shows us the effect of the deaths of his grandfather and father on his spiritual and mental life. As a boy, he shared a room with his grandfather for several years, and found that after his grandfather’s death, he could no longer sleep in that room. His father, too, he deeply loved, in spite of Red’s fierce temper, and once again that death shattered him, casting him into a deep melancholy from which he took years to recover.

After college, unable to find work, Speer returned to Boonville, earned a little money painting houses, and eventually suffered a mental breakdown. His description of this psychotic episode, which he calls his “meltdown,” lies in some ways at the heart of the book as a defining, perhaps the defining, moment in Speer’s life. His crackup culminated in his attempt to walk from Boonville to Boone, some 60 miles away. He ended his journey only a few miles outside of Boonville, collapsed in a farmer’s yard. Here is a brief but harrowing account of a soul at odds with itself, and of a young man lost even in a place which had always afforded him comfort and respite.

One fine feature of this autobiography is Speer’s sense of humor, his eye for the ridiculous, the absurd, the offbeat, the unconventional. Here, for example, in telling us where he got his love for the theater, he describes a conversation he had with his Aunt Mary about her brother, Speer’s grandfather, whom Speer called Papa:

“’Did you say Papa never finished high school?’

‘No, when he stopped high school, he was still taking freshman English, but he kept on going to school so he could play baseball and be in school plays, and he was in every play they had.’

‘How many years did he go to high school?’

‘Six years.’

‘He went to high school for six years?’

“Yes, he just kept on going ‘til they encouraged him to stop.’”

Speer has organized From Banner Elk to Boonville in chapters named after the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. Given Speer’s Quaker, Presbyterian, and Baptist roots, this device seems at first ill-fitted to the narrative and may even seem strained to some readers. Those who read carefully, however, soon see that Speer is recounting here the spiritual journey of a lifetime. He offers numerous reflections on God and mortality, and uses stories and dreams to consider both the nature of God and the place of God in his own life. Readers will be delighted to find that in these ruminations, Speer’s sense of humor does not desert him.

Allen Speer, a professor at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, has given readers a grand treat of a book — an affectionate and loving memoir of a place, a time, a man, and his people.

From Banner Elk to Boonville: The Voices Trilogy: Part III by Paul Speer. Overmountain Press, 2010.

God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin. Harcourt, 2007. 304 pages

Every once in a while a book sees print that inadvertently tells the unwashed what the elite thinks of them. Massa waltzes out of the Big House —Washington, Manhattan, Beverly Hills — rubs elbows with the field hands, and then retreats to the Big House to write the other massas about conditions on the plantation. Sometimes Massa morphs into an amateur anthropologist, breathlessly explaining to fellow denizens of the West Side or Georgetown the mores of the poor dumb savages she has encountered in the foreign wastelands of Tennessee, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash. Picador, 2007. 230 pages

This remarkable collection of short stories has already been named one of the 15 “notable books” of 2007 by the Story Prize Committee — an award that is presented annually in recognition of the nation’s best. The top award, $20,000, is the largest literary prize in America. In announcing their selection, the contest officials stated “The Appalachian Mountains are the setting of this beautifully crafted collection that begins and ends with a fish and spans several generations in an isolated region with characters as craggy as the landscape.”

How To Make A Journal Of Your Life by D. Price. Ten Speed Press, $9.95.

Ant Farm by Simon Rich. Random House, $12.95.

Many people have attempted at least once in their lives to keep a journal. Whether they use one of those expensive, leather-bound journals with creamy white paper from their local bookstore or simply a cheap notebook from Wal-Mart, they set out to chronicle their lives for their own pleasure and perhaps for the edification of their offspring.

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen. Doubleday, 2007. $22.95

Web 2.0 is killing our culture.

Evolution In A Nutshell by Martin Malloy. Trafford Publishing, 2007. 302 pages

Evolution is one of those wonderfully fiery topics which, when broached at parties or family gatherings, can convert otherwise reasonable friends and relatives into raging maniacs, shouting, slamming their fists onto the table, and crunching beer cans against their heads (somewhat like chimpanzees signaling irritation or fear).

The Machiavelli Covenant by Allan Folsom. Forge Books,2006. 560 pages

The last 20 years have seen the creation of a special niche within the genre of ÒSuspense NovelsÓ as more and more books have appeared featuring a tiny group of protagonists facing great odds as they uncover some secret from the past.