I just got back from a week on Washington Island, the remote Wisconsin island about which — once upon a time, in 2008 — I entertained fantasies of writing a book. I spent a long, solitary summer on the island that year only to return home after Labor Day with no book, no money, and an ugly bruise on my ego.

My book project failed for a bunch of reasons but one of the biggest was that after a while I was unable to divorce my writing mind from my personal affection for the people I was supposedly chronicling. It’s a trope that writing is a lonely business, but never more so than when you’re stuck six miles off the mainland, and your only connection to the rest of your life entails spotty cell service and daily trips to the library to squat on the free wifi. In that environment, when you stumble upon an actual person interested in your company,  it’s easier than you think to table your annoying questions and your digital voice recorder and take them up on that offer of a beer.

That summer came flooding back when I read Michael Paterniti’s The Telling Room, which I reviewed this month for the Tribune. (In fact, I sent the final version of the review off using the aforementioned sketchy island wifi.) The Telling Room is a food memoir, and a mystery, and a couple of other things, but at its core it is a smart and rueful meditation on storytelling and on the hazards of going native. The full review is here — and the book itself is a great read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in cheese, Spain, the pitfalls of immersion journalism, and any intersection thereof.