Book Review: Tripping to Dickeyland

“An elegy for James Dickey”

By Moristotle

There’s something very special about an audiobook recorded by the author, and Michael Hanson is an excellent reader. My paperback copy of his tribute to his mentor, the poet and novelist James Dickey, arrived from Amazon weeks ago.
    But before I got around to opening it, I heard that Michael was reading it aloud into a microphone for audiobook distribution. Since listening doesn’t tax my ailing eyes, I decided to wait for the audiobook. Michael emailed me a link to Amazon’s entry for the recording a couple of weeks ago, and I finished listening to it today.
    I fully intended to write a review for this space, but I happened to click on Amazon’s “18 customer reviews” link. After seeing how good some of them are, and realizing that I am kind of biased because of my ten years of friendship with Michael (excerpts of whose novels have appeared here), I decided that I would borrow a couple of those customer reviews for you (they are short): 

I loved Tripping to Dickeyland. Not only is it a touching memoir of friendship and mentorship with a wide emotional range (laughs and tears), it is also an incredibly honest rumination on the highs and lows of being an artist in contemporary America, providing an unsparing look at the difficulties involved in being a serious writer. It was so compelling I gulped it down in one day, stopping only to read a couple of James Dickey’s poems along the way. I’m planning to go back and read it again with my pencil (there are great lines throughout that really resonated with me). Michael Hanson has got the literary goods.

First off, I know the author fairly well, but my enjoyment of the book wasn’t due to that. In fact I hesitated and waited four months to read it because I didn’t want to be disappointed. And I wasn’t. This is a delightful memoir of the author’s growth as a writer and human being and it’s told in such a way that the reader doesn’t want to stop reading. Michael Hanson can flat out tell a good story. What might have been a list of life’s ups and downs becomes instead a shared journey through some years of a life.

    You can of course click on that “reviews” link yourself, but a better thing to do would be to just buy a copy – either the audiobook or the paperback. Enjoy!

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle