What I'm Reading

I promised you a review of the best book I've read in a long time and dun dun dun: here it is! Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski has a terrible title and a vague photo-of-someone's-feet book jacket and would've been a pretty overlooked book if a famous gut hadn't just randomly picked it up off a bookshelf (this is why we need bookstores). Said Famous Guy is Stephen King who loved it so much he wrote a scorching letter to Publisher's Weekly saying it was criminal how little the publishers were doing to promote this book because it had, as he put it, "a mother of a story." This is what made me pick it up last year and I never got around to reading it until I was travelling recently and was looking for something new. It was so incredible I've had a book hangover ever since, but sadly I think it's one of its kind. What's it about? Well, there's a woman - - an American - - who dies in a jail in Thailand and she's this anthropologist see? And she's been doing research into this tribe and living with them for years. And then relatedly, there's this American family of missionaries, who have been missionaries for GENERATIONS. And then there's this young journalist (also called Mischa but the book is a novel) who lives in Thailand with his girlfriend and is investigating the story. Broad strokes but you'll get so pulled in. Read it! I wished I was an anthropologist after I finished. #mrmbookclub #100in2022 #bookstagram #fieldwork #mischaberlinski