Monthly Archives: August 2025

Books of 2025, because I’m still mad about it

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More than 20 years ago there was a lot of press for this book that ticked many boxes for me — literary thriller! Written by a professor! Good pre-publication press! I meant to get around to reading it, and just never did.

Then, in June, LitHub‘s crime & mystery spinoff CrimeReads did a big about great coastal mysteries and right there on the list was Stephen L. Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park, and I remembered.

We were on the verge of our move, so I FIRST sought to get it from the library — but that seemed fraught, given our impending 1300 mile move, and in the end I surrendered and paid Amazon for a $9.99 Kindle edition. Fine.

The book starts slow. This is fine, I thought. The problem is: it STAYS slow. Honestly, the whole thing is an intensely navel-gazey SLOG by a guy who spends more time complaining about culture and judicial confirmation than anything else. The plot is full of unearned twists, and only barely resolves. The spurts of action feel deeply out of place in this ruminating, long-winded book. And yet: Carter got a multimillion dollar advance on this thing.

Coming finally to the Wiki article, I find a number of the quoted negative reviews to be entirely spot on:

In an episode of the Newsnight Review for the BBC, novelist Ian Rankin said he thought the book was “very well written but badly constructed” due to the conflation of a number of thriller cliches, and that the over-complicated plot obscured a great story. The A.V. Club suggested Carter had a tendency to overwrite…

Others said that the writing was at times clunky, and the extensive social commentary detracted from the narrative flow. In a negative review for the London Review of Books, critic Lorin Stein described the book as “long-winded [and] shoddily put together”, and discussed why many American reviewers paid deference to what he thought was a high-toned airport novel.

There are reasons this book is an important milestone culturally, of course — Carter is African-American, and his protagonist is a thinly veiled version of himself, at least in setup: also a law professor at a school very like where Carter himself teaches (Yale). The families involved are wealthy African Americans in New England, a tribe of folks not well represented in American letters. That’s good. But goddamn if I just wish the book wasn’t better.

Dept. of Kitchen Technology

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So. We moved. We’re renting for a year while we sell our Houston place, and ascertain just where in the Durham area we’d want to set roots, and that comes with, well, a rental house kitted out as a rental house.

It’s a nice enough property, in an owner-heavy neighborhood, but the fit & finish isn’t equal to what we left behind in Houston. The biggest sinner is the kitchen, and the biggest problem there is the deeply anemic electric range/cooktop. I have NO fucking idea how you do real cooking on electric burners, and here the problem is compounded by the fact that these just kinda suck. The only way I could keep pasta water boiling the other night was to keep the pot covered, for example. That was NOT a problem on our JennAir back in Houston.

Well, it’s also 2025, and there are Modern Solutions to Bougie Problems. Turns out, stand-alone portable induction burners are NOT expensive; the Wirecutter pick was only $120 (made by Duxtop). I’d been wanting to try one, but the last time I looked into it they were much pricier — plus, well, in Houston we lacked for kitchen space, so it would’ve been a hard sell.

Folks also seem VERY enthusiastic about the new breed of carbon steel pans, which are basically perfect for induction cooking. Since I also wasn’t entirely sure which of our pans were ferromagnetic enough to work on induction, I also picked up a modestly priced (but preseasoned) pan to go with it (made by the hilariously named Merton & Storck).

Total spend: about $160?

Both were deployed for breakfast today.

  1. HOLY SHIT the pan is hot like IMMEDIATELY — within seconds. Obviously it didn’t come up for sausage and eggs, but the scenario where you turn on the pan, pour in oil, and THEN chop the onion for saute would have to be reversed here unless you wanted a kitchen fire.

  2. This burner has two modes: simple lo/med/hi style, and then an actual TEMP mode, so you can set it to (say) 340F and it’ll stay there. Seems like you shot too high? No prob; turn it down 20 degrees. Also, there’s a “boil” mode that goes immediately to THERMONUCLEAR FULL TILT BOOGIE that I’m kind of anxious to try.

  3. This is more of a “induction + carbon steel” thing, but making a 20 degree adjustment has immediate effect. You wouldn’t get that with cast iron on the induction, but it’s an upside for the CS pans/induction burner combo. The “done cooking, keep it warm” scenario also comes to mind.

  4. Less of our cookware is induction-friendly than I would’ve thought. Obviously the cast iron all works, and the AllClad saucepan, but the fancy early-90s RevereWare set that’s been my go-to for 30 years won’t work on it at all, nor (somewhat obviously) will the famously-aluminum Calphalon. If you go this route, my advice is to get the pan AND the burner, honestly.

  5. Finally, despite it being my first foray, I ruined no food in the preparation of my breakfast. But I feel like it was a near thing.

  6. What can I cook in it for lunch?

Dept. of Heathen Updates, Jazz Edition

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Four and a half years ago I pointed y’all to this excellent cover of Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box” by piano phenom Robert Glasper. Go ahead and watch again; I’ll wait:

I don’t think this version is available outside the Youtube clip, but around the same time it was recorded (2013), Glasper released an album called Covered that contains another Radiohead track (“Reckoner”, from In Rainbows). Last year, Glasper released Keys to the City Volume One, which contains another very different cover of “Packt” that is probably also worth your time; it’s much more trip-hoppy. Keys is exclusive to AppleMusic / iTunes.

What I did NOT note at the time, though, is that the beatboxer in the clip is Taylor McFerrin. His dad is kind of a big deal.