yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it – geoff dyer

i picked this up in the travel section at the library solely because of the title, and then checked it out after it passed the barebones scrutiny of its dustjacket by having a plug from steve martin and another from someone i have never heard of who said:

What is the proper way to describe Geoff Dyer? Not deeply companionable, not viciously funny, not shockingly original, not effortlessly hip, not naively romantic, not wryly analytic, not endearingly foolish, not engagingly clever, but, perhaps, some as-yet-uninvented phrase which implies all these things at once.

that kind of review kind of makes me snort my nose but it also succeeds at making me curious, and curiosity was enough for it to pass muster for the hodgepodge of working traveler/woman traveler/solo traveler inspirational manifestos that i was accumulating. i will not read them all before i leave town. in fact, there’s a chance that this will be the only one i get through, apart from work your way around the world, which isn’t really a book one reads so much as a book one refers to when needed. it is awesome in a different way, and i will probably buy it to take it with me.

but that’s another story.

this book, as it turns out, is about traveling, drugs, writing, and the search for happiness and a sense of purpose (not necessarily in that order).

it was a good thing for me to read write now [editor’s note: i’m going to leave that typo in, because it is amusing to me].

it has also (in what feels like a somewhat bizarre coincidence, since i had no idea that it would even be mentioned, but i have been thinking about it more and more lately) steeled my intention to make it to burning man in the near future. this year is probably out, since i will still be in europe in september if the work plan takes hold even for a little while, so that means 2007 – black rock city, nevada.

i’ll add it to the DA list.

and just as a note so that you don’t think it was an accident, i filed this as both fiction and non-fiction on purpose. it is one of those kind of short story books, where the stories are real, but not necessarily strictly true, and this was my way of respecting that. if you don’t know what i mean, you should read how to tell a true war story, by tim o’brien, which is in the excellent collection entitled the things they carried, which, if you’re keeping score, is probably one of the books that would make my top 10 list, if i made such things.
and then you should read this.

unless stories of psychedelic drug use make you cringe or sigh or shrug your shoulders.

then you should possibly steer clear.

i hope the three years since it was published have been good to mr. dyer, and if i meet him in the desert of nevada sometime, i hope i get a chance to hear about them, and if i don’t, i hope it’s because i ask him something infinitely more appropriate that happens to occur to me at the time.

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