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Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It: Essays
Mordantly funny, thought-provoking travel essays, from the acclaimed author of Out of Sheer Rage and “one of our most original writers” ( New York Magazine).
This isn’t a self-help book; it’s a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In these genre-defying tales, he travels from Amsterdam to Cambodia, Rome to Indonesia, Libya to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, floundering in a sea of grievances, with fleeting moments of transcendental calm his only reward for living in a perpetual state of motion. But even as he recounts his side-splitting misadventures in each of these locales, Dyer is always able to sneak up and surprise you with insight into much more serious matters. Brilliantly riffing off our expectations of external and internal journeys, Dyer welcomes the reader as a companion, a fellow perambulator in search of something and nothing at the same time.
This isn’t a self-help book; it’s a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In these genre-defying tales, he travels from Amsterdam to Cambodia, Rome to Indonesia, Libya to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, floundering in a sea of grievances, with fleeting moments of transcendental calm his only reward for living in a perpetual state of motion. But even as he recounts his side-splitting misadventures in each of these locales, Dyer is always able to sneak up and surprise you with insight into much more serious matters. Brilliantly riffing off our expectations of external and internal journeys, Dyer welcomes the reader as a companion, a fellow perambulator in search of something and nothing at the same time.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
163 people are currently reading
2682 people want to read
About the author
Geoff Dyer
139 books924 followersGeoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 365 reviews
April 12, 2024
Geoff Dyer has written some pretty decent non-fiction, with two of my faves being The Missing of the Somme and Out of Sheer Rage. And, like both of those books, we see Geoff off on his travels once again. But, one of the big differences with Dyer and other travelogue writers is that, despite being literally addicted to travel, going all over the globe, he is more of a counter-tourist. He doesn't go off super excited sightseeing with camera in hand eagerly ready to snap left, right and centre for one thing. Sometimes he doesn't actually do anything at all other than loiter about. It's not really the places the book focuses on. It's more about himself; a self-reflection. Yes, he can be very observant at times, and likes to mingle with the locals, but this is a guy who is generally adrift, agitated and having a mini existential crisis. But, despite having a bit of a Thomas bernhard-esque winge and a moan, the thing that makes it all work is that he has such an engaging voice.The sort of guy you'd have around for dinner and you wouldn't be that bothered if you couldn't get a word in. Sometimes he can be so funny, but not necessarily because of what he is saying is funny, it's more the way he says it. His writing brims with unconventional insights and egotistical philosophising, and sometimes you feel he is all too well aware of his own ridiculousness in certain situations. It works both as a memoir: there is this whole thing of Dyer picturing his younger self, and sort of anti self-help book. Lovers of someone like Paul Theroux might find the ambling Dyer, in terms of rousing travelogue, pretty aimless and non eventful in places: even when in exotic locales you feel he may as well be stuck in some boring and grim English town, and I don't believe this to be one of his best, but I've always found it a pleasure to be in his company. Even when he's not on top form he's impossible not to like.
May 3, 2009
The first essay is very entertaining. The second essay is entertaining. And... so on down the line.
Here is my problem with this collection: there is a formula that emerges after you read about three of the essays. Here is it:
a) Dyer arrives in a foreign city.
b) Dyer quickly befriends a fellow traveler/crank/drugged-out loony.
c) Said Loony introduced Dyer to Very Hot Girl.
d) Dyer & Loony acquire some drugs.
e) Dyer & Loony wander around foreign city. Insert scenery.
f) VHG drifts in for a scene, and out again.
g) Dyer laments the fact that he's getting absolutely nothing accomplished while wandering around the city stoned.
h) Dyer sleeps with VHG.
i) Dyer departs city.
There is a variation here--Dyer might have actually arrived in the city with a VHG of his own, an actual girlfriend. This changes the essay only in that they do not sleep together.
These essays strike me as the mostly mundane fantasies of a 20-something guy--that there is some value (not articulated here) of a peripetetic existence, and that work factors into life very little, that drugs are essential, and that the world is filled with VHGs interested in sleeping with you. Dyer was in his 40s when he wrote these essays.
That said, there are occasionally moments of interest and entertainment, but nothing revealing about the places he visits, what is it to be a tourist interacting in these places, what it might mean emotionally to be moving around constantly, what he thinks he's going to get out of traveling, or anything else truly thoughtful.
Here is my problem with this collection: there is a formula that emerges after you read about three of the essays. Here is it:
a) Dyer arrives in a foreign city.
b) Dyer quickly befriends a fellow traveler/crank/drugged-out loony.
c) Said Loony introduced Dyer to Very Hot Girl.
d) Dyer & Loony acquire some drugs.
e) Dyer & Loony wander around foreign city. Insert scenery.
f) VHG drifts in for a scene, and out again.
g) Dyer laments the fact that he's getting absolutely nothing accomplished while wandering around the city stoned.
h) Dyer sleeps with VHG.
i) Dyer departs city.
There is a variation here--Dyer might have actually arrived in the city with a VHG of his own, an actual girlfriend. This changes the essay only in that they do not sleep together.
These essays strike me as the mostly mundane fantasies of a 20-something guy--that there is some value (not articulated here) of a peripetetic existence, and that work factors into life very little, that drugs are essential, and that the world is filled with VHGs interested in sleeping with you. Dyer was in his 40s when he wrote these essays.
That said, there are occasionally moments of interest and entertainment, but nothing revealing about the places he visits, what is it to be a tourist interacting in these places, what it might mean emotionally to be moving around constantly, what he thinks he's going to get out of traveling, or anything else truly thoughtful.
October 27, 2011
Geoff takes various shirts, various drugs, and various girls, to various locations around the world, intellectualising as he goes, sometimes having impish larks along the way, sometimes having nervous breakdowns, sometimes having sex with black women. At first, I was amused at this bourgeois intellect mincing around like a Club 18-30 member, then I found his antics a little drab, indulgent and flâneurish. At first his laid-back prose reads like a treat, but lapses at midpoint into a meandering and pedestrian snooze. I think the essays could use more thematic focus, and less obsessive personal detail, quite a whack of which paints Geoff as a tosspot. But all in all . . . a nice airport read.
May 28, 2011
I may have enjoyed this memoir by British author Geoff Dyer a bit more if, prior to picking it up, I had ever heard of Geoff Dyer--not to mention to have actually have read him. The picture he paints is not of a worldly intellectual traveling off the beaten path and living the moment, but of a rather immature, self-aggrandizing would-be thinker behaving like a teenager while actually in his 40s. His tales of drug-taking and drinking to excess did little to endear him to me, and the "screamingly funny" wit promised on the front cover never materialized. Instead, I had to slog through dialogue on this level:
"The tree's being consists entirely of growing," said Circle (Dyer has a large cast of friends and acquaintances with names like Circle and Dazed) in the course of one of our walks.
"I disagree."
"So do I."
Or this:
"Happens all the time," the guy with the tattoo of a washing machine on his arm said.
"Does it?"
"It's the heat."
"What?"
"Drives people nuts."
"What does?"
"The heat."
"Yes," I said. "I can imagine..."
In sum, I found next to nothing worthwhile in this book.
"The tree's being consists entirely of growing," said Circle (Dyer has a large cast of friends and acquaintances with names like Circle and Dazed) in the course of one of our walks.
"I disagree."
"So do I."
Or this:
"Happens all the time," the guy with the tattoo of a washing machine on his arm said.
"Does it?"
"It's the heat."
"What?"
"Drives people nuts."
"What does?"
"The heat."
"Yes," I said. "I can imagine..."
In sum, I found next to nothing worthwhile in this book.
May 15, 2013
"Then a hustler with wayward and unkempt eyes accosted us.
"D'you speak English?" he wanted to know.
"To a very high standard," I said.
"Could you do me a favour?"
"Almost certainly not," I said. For a moment he looked totally crestfallen. Then he went on his way without even saying, "Fuck you." In its way it was one of the most satisfying exchanges of my life. He could have been the risen Christ for all we cared.
What else?"
This is how Geoff Dyer writes: as if he is a friend filling you in on his varied travels (New Orleans, Cambodia, Miami, Libya, Thailand...). Only, this friend likes to do a lot of drugs, and is kind of a neurotic genius, and is hilarious. The section in which he describes trying to change his pants in the bathroom of an Amsterdam coffee shop while tripping on mushrooms is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
I can see how this book would annoy some. It is incredibly self-indulgent, as Dyer writes with surprising honesty about his sexual conquests and drug adventures, all the while complaining about how boring it is to be a writer, traveling, with nothing to do but drugs and women. Unlike George Saunders, who, in"The Braindead Megaphone", writes travel sketches that reach out and yearn to understand others and improve the world, Dyer looks inward and yearns to understand the complex mess that is himself. I happen to relate more to that kind of self-indulgence than to the compassion of Saunders. When people knock a book for being self-indulgent, I tend to think, well, I have a self too, and my self gets where that self is coming from.
That being said, I think Dyer has elevated self-indulgent writing to an art. Because, behind the stoner veneer is a brilliant and witty mind that is able to tease out just enough about wanderlust and travel and the human tendency toward dissatisfaction that, in each essay you realize there is a much larger point to all this than simply being regaled by his multitude of travel stories. He uses his own personal mess as a metaphor for the messy world he encounters. And though he is indulgent, he is excellent at delivering a slice of humility at just the right moments, making it clear that he views his conquests only as brief, bright flares in an otherwise humbling existence.
He does manage to put his pants on in that bathroom in Amsterdam, but he puts them on backwards.
"D'you speak English?" he wanted to know.
"To a very high standard," I said.
"Could you do me a favour?"
"Almost certainly not," I said. For a moment he looked totally crestfallen. Then he went on his way without even saying, "Fuck you." In its way it was one of the most satisfying exchanges of my life. He could have been the risen Christ for all we cared.
What else?"
This is how Geoff Dyer writes: as if he is a friend filling you in on his varied travels (New Orleans, Cambodia, Miami, Libya, Thailand...). Only, this friend likes to do a lot of drugs, and is kind of a neurotic genius, and is hilarious. The section in which he describes trying to change his pants in the bathroom of an Amsterdam coffee shop while tripping on mushrooms is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
I can see how this book would annoy some. It is incredibly self-indulgent, as Dyer writes with surprising honesty about his sexual conquests and drug adventures, all the while complaining about how boring it is to be a writer, traveling, with nothing to do but drugs and women. Unlike George Saunders, who, in"The Braindead Megaphone", writes travel sketches that reach out and yearn to understand others and improve the world, Dyer looks inward and yearns to understand the complex mess that is himself. I happen to relate more to that kind of self-indulgence than to the compassion of Saunders. When people knock a book for being self-indulgent, I tend to think, well, I have a self too, and my self gets where that self is coming from.
That being said, I think Dyer has elevated self-indulgent writing to an art. Because, behind the stoner veneer is a brilliant and witty mind that is able to tease out just enough about wanderlust and travel and the human tendency toward dissatisfaction that, in each essay you realize there is a much larger point to all this than simply being regaled by his multitude of travel stories. He uses his own personal mess as a metaphor for the messy world he encounters. And though he is indulgent, he is excellent at delivering a slice of humility at just the right moments, making it clear that he views his conquests only as brief, bright flares in an otherwise humbling existence.
He does manage to put his pants on in that bathroom in Amsterdam, but he puts them on backwards.
October 15, 2008
At first I kind of liked the book, then I thought the author was a miserable wanker. After a while the essays devolved into a typical pattern of him moving to a new city, pretending to write or work on a book or something, meet a woman, sleep with her or not, engage in some dialogue that was vaguely West Wing-esque, then ingest some controlled substances and finally wrap it up in a bit of hackneyed wisdom. Somewhere along the last or second to last essay he managed to fashion a memoir out of a series of vignettes about his travels and won my heart. Damn you, you little wanker. (I think he'd agree that he's basically a wanker. And he's British, so he's half way there to begin with.)
March 5, 2008
I really got to loathe Mr. Dyer. I really thought he was a selfish shallow bastard by the end. He made me uncomfortable and afraid of ever running into him at a bar or something. I'm actually surprised by the number of people who enjoyed this book and was entertained for about .000008th of a second to re-read it and therefore rejudge. But then I came to my senses. I remember hating the person and not the writing which is why it gets any stars.
January 9, 2025
I really wanted to like this memoir/travelogue better. In the first chapter I had one of those keenly exciting verification moments, when the reader's own experience is confirmed and thereby actualized through abstraction in someone else's prose, the flesh made word, as it were. In this chapter, Dyer describes the three months he lived on the fringes of the French Quarter of New Orleans, a period during which he breakfasted every day on an almond croissant at the bakery Croissant d'Or. The almond croissants were, he writes, "the best almond croissants I had (and have) ever tasted." When I lived in New Orleans, on the outskirts of the French Quarter, I frequented the Croissant d'Or (not every day, but I actually lived there) and I invariably had an almond croissant. They were ambrosial. Every almond croissant I have eaten since moving away has been a disappointment. When I read Dyer's superlative assessment of the croissants' toothsomeness, I wanted to show somebody, to prove that I was right, but who could possibly care?
Which is the entire problem with this well-written piece of middle-aged juvenilia. YFPWCBBTDI is finely crafted but jejune. Sentence by sentence, Geoff Dyer is a witty, companionable writer, but the cumulative effect of these pieces is of spending time with an erudite and verbally deft but smugly irritating man-boy. In the interest of full disclosure I should say here that I judge him harshly because I identify with him completely. I'm an overeducated, middle-aged pothead with an appalling lack of ambition and an adolescent sensibility. Like Dyer, I think I love to travel, but I frequently find a disjuncture between the transformative experience I believe I'm supposed to be having and the anomic dissatisfaction I actually feel.
I like Geoff Dyer as a writer. I would definitely read him again. But I ultimately had little patience for this binge of self-indulgence and self-pity disguised as tough self-excoriation. There were moments, like the scene when he's weeping big fat look-how-I've-wasted-my-life crocodile tears into his eggs at a Detroit diner, or his mystical rhapsody on the gift economy at Burning Man, when I really couldn't believe I was reading a book by a man in his forties. Like me, Geoff Dyer needs to grow the fuck up.
Which is the entire problem with this well-written piece of middle-aged juvenilia. YFPWCBBTDI is finely crafted but jejune. Sentence by sentence, Geoff Dyer is a witty, companionable writer, but the cumulative effect of these pieces is of spending time with an erudite and verbally deft but smugly irritating man-boy. In the interest of full disclosure I should say here that I judge him harshly because I identify with him completely. I'm an overeducated, middle-aged pothead with an appalling lack of ambition and an adolescent sensibility. Like Dyer, I think I love to travel, but I frequently find a disjuncture between the transformative experience I believe I'm supposed to be having and the anomic dissatisfaction I actually feel.
I like Geoff Dyer as a writer. I would definitely read him again. But I ultimately had little patience for this binge of self-indulgence and self-pity disguised as tough self-excoriation. There were moments, like the scene when he's weeping big fat look-how-I've-wasted-my-life crocodile tears into his eggs at a Detroit diner, or his mystical rhapsody on the gift economy at Burning Man, when I really couldn't believe I was reading a book by a man in his forties. Like me, Geoff Dyer needs to grow the fuck up.
March 24, 2009
The only serious flaw in this otherwise extraordinary book is its title, which, in an attempt to seem playfully ironic, may mislead readers who would otherwise be glad to find it. It is decidedly not a talk-show-Dr. Phil-co-dependent no more sort of thing. It is rather a deeply meditative travel book, with chapters set in Paris, Cambodia, Libya, Amsterdam, and southern Thailand, and a narrative voice that is sly, lyrical, self-cynical, and painfully funny. The funny parts (which are always also painful) involve Dyer himself in a deeply stoned condition (he periodically seeks out powerful varieties of skunk weed, mushrooms, and other assorted pharmaceuticals) trying to navigate landscapes, relationships, and his own connection to the past without losing his dignity or his sense of place. He succeeds at all of this, finally, but only after some grimly honest self-assessments followed by moral slippages followed by still more self-scrutiny. It’s not Dr. Phil, but it’s also not Cheech and Chong or Carlos Casteneda. Drugs are a part of things for Dyer, but they are mostly familiar companions that he takes along while trying to find a moral home. The prose is stunning, the descriptions of place clear-eyed and sharply rendered, the dialogue quirky and real. I couldn’t stop reading it, couldn’t stop wondering what Dyer would show me next.
Dyer as a writer has several layers, and so I want to recommend another of his books that I read last year. It was a gift from daughter Laura entitled But Beautiful, and consists of about a dozen lightly fictionalized portraits of jazz artists from the classic age—Ellington, Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Art Pepper and others. Like Yoga, the writing here is almost flawless, and Dyer makes you want to listen to the music again, hear it again, but differently maybe.
Dyer as a writer has several layers, and so I want to recommend another of his books that I read last year. It was a gift from daughter Laura entitled But Beautiful, and consists of about a dozen lightly fictionalized portraits of jazz artists from the classic age—Ellington, Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Art Pepper and others. Like Yoga, the writing here is almost flawless, and Dyer makes you want to listen to the music again, hear it again, but differently maybe.
Want to read
April 1, 2020This a book I want to read. Some of the reasons stem from the interview Geoff gave to Publico, a Portuguese daily newspaper [31st May 2013].
1-Though he’s written a great variety of genres (fiction, essay…) the book is, in a way, “unclassifiable”: it’s located somewhere in the border between “fiction and reality”...sometimes closer to reportage.
2-The Place is paramount: the book is a collection of short stories (that really happened) about concrete places: Cambodia, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Rome, the Nevada desert and Indonesia. Geoff acknowledged some literary complicity (on the style) with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard:”…a certain comedy, philosophical considerations with the pretension to change nothing" whatsoever…. Yes, he runs the risk of dispersion.
3-The title derives from a Yoga precept: empty your mind…from distractions.
4-The book was written at a time when Geoff was almost convinced he was “done” as a writer; then he started scribbling about those places he’d been in: he had plenty of stuff, since he’d been in a lot of places.
5-Geoff will be 55 next 5th of June. He said as he gets older he reads less and less fiction. He hasn’t got the same feeling as 20 years ago when reading George Elliot. He affirmed that most of the writing that presently attracts him is “reportage”: “there are fantastic books (novels cannot compete with) about the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan” ….reporters like Dexter Filkins (NYTimes) and David Finkel (Washington Post). One of his favorite authors is Ryszard Kapuscinsky, unquestionably good from a literary point of view, though questionable when relating to facts confirmation.
1-Though he’s written a great variety of genres (fiction, essay…) the book is, in a way, “unclassifiable”: it’s located somewhere in the border between “fiction and reality”...sometimes closer to reportage.
2-The Place is paramount: the book is a collection of short stories (that really happened) about concrete places: Cambodia, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Rome, the Nevada desert and Indonesia. Geoff acknowledged some literary complicity (on the style) with the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard:”…a certain comedy, philosophical considerations with the pretension to change nothing" whatsoever…. Yes, he runs the risk of dispersion.
3-The title derives from a Yoga precept: empty your mind…from distractions.
4-The book was written at a time when Geoff was almost convinced he was “done” as a writer; then he started scribbling about those places he’d been in: he had plenty of stuff, since he’d been in a lot of places.
5-Geoff will be 55 next 5th of June. He said as he gets older he reads less and less fiction. He hasn’t got the same feeling as 20 years ago when reading George Elliot. He affirmed that most of the writing that presently attracts him is “reportage”: “there are fantastic books (novels cannot compete with) about the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan” ….reporters like Dexter Filkins (NYTimes) and David Finkel (Washington Post). One of his favorite authors is Ryszard Kapuscinsky, unquestionably good from a literary point of view, though questionable when relating to facts confirmation.
August 21, 2023
Not as good as Out of sheer rage, but I trully loved reading this travel log in my hammock
March 3, 2015
I have been so impressed by Geoff Dyer's The Search and Zona that I -- somewhat prematurely -- came to the conclusion that here was a writer whose work was golden. Well, with Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It I saw that I mistook for gold was perhaps brass. Each of the eleven essays in this book is about a man suffering a mid-life crisis trying to find some solution by travel. In fact, there is no essay about Mr. Dyer at home, because Mr. Dyer does not appear to ever be home.
There are two unfortunate traits he seems to display:
First, he is so uncomfortable in his own skin that he frequently needs chemical stimulation to ease the pain of being Geoff Dyer.
Second, he is lonely a good part of the time. In some of these essays, he is with a girlfriend in a highly temporary relationship in which he does not appear to have any real sense of emotional commitment invested. Neither does the girlfriend. So naturally, Poof! They're gone!
Still, I enjoyed reading the essays; I did, however, congratulate myself that I am not so complicated as their author.
There are two unfortunate traits he seems to display:
First, he is so uncomfortable in his own skin that he frequently needs chemical stimulation to ease the pain of being Geoff Dyer.
Second, he is lonely a good part of the time. In some of these essays, he is with a girlfriend in a highly temporary relationship in which he does not appear to have any real sense of emotional commitment invested. Neither does the girlfriend. So naturally, Poof! They're gone!
Still, I enjoyed reading the essays; I did, however, congratulate myself that I am not so complicated as their author.
January 2, 2008
Such an interesting title. Such uninteresting insides.
August 11, 2013
I am not surprised to learn that there are many readers who begin this book thinking it may help them understand yoga or the book be interesting enough that it doesn't matter that the writing is not about yoga at all. Early on in their reading many of these readers discover it isn't enough for Geoff Dyer to be clever and cute, complaining, and otherwise dependent on his own incessant and awful truths. Dyer's silliness for names, his middle-age juvenile behavior towards drugs and porno send some people heading for the exits without holding on and seeing that the best of his writing certainly does come later. When my editor and teacher, Gordon Lish, quits reading a student's work aloud after just one sentence and the student cries out abruptly and pleadingly that his work gets better if Gordon would just continue on, Lish says that "if it gets better later then you should have started there." As a reader, and writer, I usually follow this same rule myself as I am a devoted student of Lish's teaching and it has served me well over the last seventeen years. The readers who have quit this book because of what they deem as unnecessary reading and a waste of time are wrong in this particular case, but it is Geoff Dyer's fault for not beginning sooner with the goods needed to keep the discerning reader moving on down the page. Problem is, I don't think Geoff Dyer cares if you read his work or not. He pretty much, it seems, imagines you won't and that you would not be interested in anything he has to say anyway.
I stayed with Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It to the end because I do like Geoff Dyer, as flawed a character as he has proven to me himself to be. I am interested in Dyer for many reasons, but the main one is his knowledge of other artists and writers that I have both known and desire to know better. I will never travel as much as Dyer does and I make my world travels to destinations through him vicariously just as I am also preparing to do soon with another writer, though dead, by the name of D. H. Lawrence. Dyer introduced me to Lawrence more intimately than any other critic has been able to do thus far, and it wasn't until last week that I decided to read and study Lawrence next. I give full credit to Geoff Dyer for this and that is why I do not quit on him even though I want to and the Lish rules state that I must. The following notes are some I made during the reading of this book and you can see I was having both a hard time and a little fun while it lasted.
The juvenile tone of this book is grating. Hard to believe this is the same writer of Out of Sheer Rage. A girlfriend he calls Circle is a little too much for me and the trips he takes with her are not very interesting until the very last. It isn't until the end of the book that Circle comes "full circle" and changes her name back to Sarah. Too bad Dyer did not leave her name Sarah to begin with. Coming "full circle" really isn't all that important to this work as metaphorically it is obvious we all come "full circle", including Sarah, by the time we get to the end anyway.
The Skunk chapter was pretty good. It brought back memories of getting high, being paranoid, and smoking the stuff with somebody who willingly partook of the weed with you but then couldn't handle very well being high and proceeds to get a whole lot unglued and blaming you in the process. An ugly ugly scene. Bravo. I think this is where most readers get off the Dyer train. It is a little too much but I enjoyed revisiting my memories. Dyer can really make you remember being high on mushrooms or very good weed. I haven't read anybody better at taking you there.
The title story Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It is a lovely tale of drugs and peaceful Southeast Asian sanctuaries where truth is sought and love, sometimes, wins out. The love story involving, I think her name was Kate, is actually pretty great, but what is even more imposing is the way the author left this peaceful place, and his newest love, and went on to what came next in his travels almost without batting an eyelid. Amazing to me, and outside my frame of reference in the history of a life I personally have led in regards to being in love and ending relationships.
Names pop up again in later chapters like Amsterdam Dave and Dazed and they lessen the impact of the stories here as I take the tales less seriously and respectfully. I think either Dyer could have toned the names down or done a better job of making them up. A girlfriend called Daze is not a good name by any stretch. However, the two pieces that include Daze in them were good. An over-forty writer named Dyer taking mushrooms and smoking hydro-grown weed was a nice experience for me, reading about it, relishing in the prospects of perhaps someday again doing so myself. But I am old and most likely out of time for this. I have noticed some negative comments regarding Dyer's use of drugs at this age as being juvenile but I think it is silly to even say these things. I say good for him, good that he can explain it in ways better than most anything else I have ever read, but bad because of his insistence on defusing the situation with shitty names for people, and if the names were real, what was he even doing with these people? Dyer is professional at degrading himself and attempting to prove he is a loser in the daily course of his long life. He is somehow proud he has accomplished nothing, has little motivation that is lasting, and would rather not do much of anything he is sort of supposed to to be doing. In the process he does do a lot and tells us about it. Even if it doesn't amount to much in the entire scope of things that we as a society deem important.
Seems Dyer stays in pitiful hotels a lot, perhaps too often, and has a hard time finding more expensive hotels in worse shape and service than the one he is stuck with. I found the chapter on Leptis Magna quite interesting as he was in Libya feeling like the only tourist there, with dirty sheets and bad food, bored and boring, and realizing that this is the way of life for these people.
The Rain Inside is a chapter devoted to covering an electronic music festival in Detroit. A recurring theme in many of Dyer's stories is his chronic unhappiness even if things are going well enough that he ought to be happy. But most times it is raining where he travels to and things are never what they are hyped or even expected to be. I have read other work of Dyer's where he expresses his love for porno and hotel rooms and the following quote is part of a trend for him. "If you are happy, being alone in a hotel, on expenses, drinking beer, and watching porno is close to bliss; but if you are lonely and unloved it is utterly soul-destroying." Dyer is self-reflective most times unless he is looking for oblivion, which happens often on his pages too.
This book was a fast and fun read for me. I hated the stupid stuff early on but it certainly did get better the further on I read. I doubt I will ever read this book again, but it is certainly worth at least one reading by most people. If nothing else it would help us all to understand that there are all kinds of people all over the world, even next door to us, who are different than we are and it isn't bad or good. It just is.
I stayed with Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It to the end because I do like Geoff Dyer, as flawed a character as he has proven to me himself to be. I am interested in Dyer for many reasons, but the main one is his knowledge of other artists and writers that I have both known and desire to know better. I will never travel as much as Dyer does and I make my world travels to destinations through him vicariously just as I am also preparing to do soon with another writer, though dead, by the name of D. H. Lawrence. Dyer introduced me to Lawrence more intimately than any other critic has been able to do thus far, and it wasn't until last week that I decided to read and study Lawrence next. I give full credit to Geoff Dyer for this and that is why I do not quit on him even though I want to and the Lish rules state that I must. The following notes are some I made during the reading of this book and you can see I was having both a hard time and a little fun while it lasted.
The juvenile tone of this book is grating. Hard to believe this is the same writer of Out of Sheer Rage. A girlfriend he calls Circle is a little too much for me and the trips he takes with her are not very interesting until the very last. It isn't until the end of the book that Circle comes "full circle" and changes her name back to Sarah. Too bad Dyer did not leave her name Sarah to begin with. Coming "full circle" really isn't all that important to this work as metaphorically it is obvious we all come "full circle", including Sarah, by the time we get to the end anyway.
The Skunk chapter was pretty good. It brought back memories of getting high, being paranoid, and smoking the stuff with somebody who willingly partook of the weed with you but then couldn't handle very well being high and proceeds to get a whole lot unglued and blaming you in the process. An ugly ugly scene. Bravo. I think this is where most readers get off the Dyer train. It is a little too much but I enjoyed revisiting my memories. Dyer can really make you remember being high on mushrooms or very good weed. I haven't read anybody better at taking you there.
The title story Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It is a lovely tale of drugs and peaceful Southeast Asian sanctuaries where truth is sought and love, sometimes, wins out. The love story involving, I think her name was Kate, is actually pretty great, but what is even more imposing is the way the author left this peaceful place, and his newest love, and went on to what came next in his travels almost without batting an eyelid. Amazing to me, and outside my frame of reference in the history of a life I personally have led in regards to being in love and ending relationships.
Names pop up again in later chapters like Amsterdam Dave and Dazed and they lessen the impact of the stories here as I take the tales less seriously and respectfully. I think either Dyer could have toned the names down or done a better job of making them up. A girlfriend called Daze is not a good name by any stretch. However, the two pieces that include Daze in them were good. An over-forty writer named Dyer taking mushrooms and smoking hydro-grown weed was a nice experience for me, reading about it, relishing in the prospects of perhaps someday again doing so myself. But I am old and most likely out of time for this. I have noticed some negative comments regarding Dyer's use of drugs at this age as being juvenile but I think it is silly to even say these things. I say good for him, good that he can explain it in ways better than most anything else I have ever read, but bad because of his insistence on defusing the situation with shitty names for people, and if the names were real, what was he even doing with these people? Dyer is professional at degrading himself and attempting to prove he is a loser in the daily course of his long life. He is somehow proud he has accomplished nothing, has little motivation that is lasting, and would rather not do much of anything he is sort of supposed to to be doing. In the process he does do a lot and tells us about it. Even if it doesn't amount to much in the entire scope of things that we as a society deem important.
Seems Dyer stays in pitiful hotels a lot, perhaps too often, and has a hard time finding more expensive hotels in worse shape and service than the one he is stuck with. I found the chapter on Leptis Magna quite interesting as he was in Libya feeling like the only tourist there, with dirty sheets and bad food, bored and boring, and realizing that this is the way of life for these people.
The Rain Inside is a chapter devoted to covering an electronic music festival in Detroit. A recurring theme in many of Dyer's stories is his chronic unhappiness even if things are going well enough that he ought to be happy. But most times it is raining where he travels to and things are never what they are hyped or even expected to be. I have read other work of Dyer's where he expresses his love for porno and hotel rooms and the following quote is part of a trend for him. "If you are happy, being alone in a hotel, on expenses, drinking beer, and watching porno is close to bliss; but if you are lonely and unloved it is utterly soul-destroying." Dyer is self-reflective most times unless he is looking for oblivion, which happens often on his pages too.
This book was a fast and fun read for me. I hated the stupid stuff early on but it certainly did get better the further on I read. I doubt I will ever read this book again, but it is certainly worth at least one reading by most people. If nothing else it would help us all to understand that there are all kinds of people all over the world, even next door to us, who are different than we are and it isn't bad or good. It just is.
September 13, 2012
Many other reviews have touched upon the same experience I had while reading this book. I didn't like Mr. Dyer much. I thought he was very macho and insensitive to women, and viewed them only as objects to be either worshiped, ignored or used briefly for his personal fulfillment. Occasionally he did have female travel companions or girlfriends that accompanied him. These women mostly served to have pointless existential conversations with Mr. Dyer when he felt one of his existential moods coming on. This usually happened after Mr. Dyer and his friends got stoned.
Some parts of the book were amusing. I enjoyed Mr. Dyer's commentary about New Age culture in the chapter entitled "yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it". Other parts of Mr. Dyer's commentary had humorous points, but the dialogue usually lapsed into a conglomerate of stoner musings, disorganized thought patterns, references to authors and philosophers Mr. Dyer admires with no background information for the reader (I am assuming this is done intentionally to inspire the reader into learning more about those authors, but perhaps this is giving Mr. Dyer too much credit) and giant leaps from topic to topic.
Yet I've given this review three stars. The humor thrown about in the book was enough to redeem it and keep me interested. On the topic of redemption, Mr. Dyer's character is never redeemed in the book. At certain points he began to contemplate reforming his ways but the reader is never fully shown his humanity. In the course of the book he had a breakdown, and rather than using that breakdown to reflect on the error of his ways and the changes he might make, he followed our glimpse into his humanity with more incoherent musings on the philosophy of the continuum or non-continuum of time. I'm left with the lingering question "what did Mr. Dyer do in his 20s and even 30s by which he had not come to an understanding about his identity and his place in the world by his 40s?" The only answer I came come up with is simply "drugs".
On a personal rant:
Although this book inspires me to travel, I don't. The reason is the attitude towards women that is prevalent in this book and around the world. Imagine a woman traveling alone for fun to Libya. I "can't be bothered" while attempting to travel and see the sights with men approaching me with unwanted advances and constantly needing to ward off these advances. It doesn't matter what a woman looks like for this to happen. Don't think this has prevented me from traveling. I have traveled a fair amount, in fact, I may have been in a cafe in the background in one of the Paris scenes of this book. I want Mr. Dyer to imagine, for a moment, being a woman traveling alone in Rome, or any of the places he visited, just for a day, attempting to peacefully sit in a cafe lost in though without being harassed and interrupted several times. In his musings, Mr. Dyer does nothing to dispel this view of women. But in all fairness, this is his memoir, not a commentary on the state of worldwide feminism.
Some parts of the book were amusing. I enjoyed Mr. Dyer's commentary about New Age culture in the chapter entitled "yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it". Other parts of Mr. Dyer's commentary had humorous points, but the dialogue usually lapsed into a conglomerate of stoner musings, disorganized thought patterns, references to authors and philosophers Mr. Dyer admires with no background information for the reader (I am assuming this is done intentionally to inspire the reader into learning more about those authors, but perhaps this is giving Mr. Dyer too much credit) and giant leaps from topic to topic.
Yet I've given this review three stars. The humor thrown about in the book was enough to redeem it and keep me interested. On the topic of redemption, Mr. Dyer's character is never redeemed in the book. At certain points he began to contemplate reforming his ways but the reader is never fully shown his humanity. In the course of the book he had a breakdown, and rather than using that breakdown to reflect on the error of his ways and the changes he might make, he followed our glimpse into his humanity with more incoherent musings on the philosophy of the continuum or non-continuum of time. I'm left with the lingering question "what did Mr. Dyer do in his 20s and even 30s by which he had not come to an understanding about his identity and his place in the world by his 40s?" The only answer I came come up with is simply "drugs".
On a personal rant:
Although this book inspires me to travel, I don't. The reason is the attitude towards women that is prevalent in this book and around the world. Imagine a woman traveling alone for fun to Libya. I "can't be bothered" while attempting to travel and see the sights with men approaching me with unwanted advances and constantly needing to ward off these advances. It doesn't matter what a woman looks like for this to happen. Don't think this has prevented me from traveling. I have traveled a fair amount, in fact, I may have been in a cafe in the background in one of the Paris scenes of this book. I want Mr. Dyer to imagine, for a moment, being a woman traveling alone in Rome, or any of the places he visited, just for a day, attempting to peacefully sit in a cafe lost in though without being harassed and interrupted several times. In his musings, Mr. Dyer does nothing to dispel this view of women. But in all fairness, this is his memoir, not a commentary on the state of worldwide feminism.
January 10, 2018
4th book for 2018.
I wasn't predisposed to hate this book. I like the vicarious thrill of reading about outsiders thumbing their noses to the system, visiting exotic lands, taking too many drugs, having sex in unexpected places. But the books have to say something interesting. Dyer's book is just boring. He comes across as a self-pitying man-child, who thinks he is just so much more intelligent than those around him. He literally berates a black girlfriend in New Orleans for not knowing as much about the Civil Rights Movement as he. Seriously? He hangs around Rome on some grant, doing no work, getting drunk in bars, hitting on some friend's girlfriend (he literally talks about her white cotton panties at one point - we know they don't have sex because he would have bragged about it in graphic detail in the book), taking crap about some movie he'll never make with a writer half his age, who can still respect him (presumably writers his own age didn't want to hang out with him). In Paris he meets a woman at a dinner party, who he clearly lusts after (but denies), and who then agrees to meet with him the next day. He gets her to take some super strong dope with him to help him "get in the zone". She freaks out, and is totally paranoid about him (presumably because he is putting out creepy older man vibes) and runs away. He blames her. His first thought at getting to Amsterdam for a friends 40th birthday is to get so wasted with a stranger called Dave that he won't remember the weekend. He is is staying at the Hotel Oblivion. Get it? In Detroit, he hangs around a rave, but is freaked out when he realizes the younger kids think he is a narc (presumably because he is putting out creepy older man vibes). Also apparently Libya under Gaddafi had crappy hotels and lazy waiters which he personally finds offensive. My favorite part of the book was when he realizes his life is shit and he starts crying into his eggs at breakfast, but even there I suspect they were the same crocodile tears he accused a Cambodian beggar of having earlier in the book. Scattered throughout are pseudo-intellectual references to Blake, Rilke, Antonioni etc.
Avoid.
I wasn't predisposed to hate this book. I like the vicarious thrill of reading about outsiders thumbing their noses to the system, visiting exotic lands, taking too many drugs, having sex in unexpected places. But the books have to say something interesting. Dyer's book is just boring. He comes across as a self-pitying man-child, who thinks he is just so much more intelligent than those around him. He literally berates a black girlfriend in New Orleans for not knowing as much about the Civil Rights Movement as he. Seriously? He hangs around Rome on some grant, doing no work, getting drunk in bars, hitting on some friend's girlfriend (he literally talks about her white cotton panties at one point - we know they don't have sex because he would have bragged about it in graphic detail in the book), taking crap about some movie he'll never make with a writer half his age, who can still respect him (presumably writers his own age didn't want to hang out with him). In Paris he meets a woman at a dinner party, who he clearly lusts after (but denies), and who then agrees to meet with him the next day. He gets her to take some super strong dope with him to help him "get in the zone". She freaks out, and is totally paranoid about him (presumably because he is putting out creepy older man vibes) and runs away. He blames her. His first thought at getting to Amsterdam for a friends 40th birthday is to get so wasted with a stranger called Dave that he won't remember the weekend. He is is staying at the Hotel Oblivion. Get it? In Detroit, he hangs around a rave, but is freaked out when he realizes the younger kids think he is a narc (presumably because he is putting out creepy older man vibes). Also apparently Libya under Gaddafi had crappy hotels and lazy waiters which he personally finds offensive. My favorite part of the book was when he realizes his life is shit and he starts crying into his eggs at breakfast, but even there I suspect they were the same crocodile tears he accused a Cambodian beggar of having earlier in the book. Scattered throughout are pseudo-intellectual references to Blake, Rilke, Antonioni etc.
Avoid.
April 2, 2009
A collection of loosely linked -- well, not travel pieces, really, just essays from someone who's ended up moving around rather a lot. As a narrator, Dyer's enormously endearing as he wanders around, equal parts gung-ho and despondent, alternately quoting Auden and dropping acid. For Dyer the writer, Englishness -- or a characteristic I like to pretend is Englishness -- is a tremendous boon. Because this is really a Journey book, about a Seeker on a sort of stumbling, stoned search for transcendence, but Dyer's humor and stoic wryness keep things from getting too much like, you know, that.
The final piece attempts to tie together several of the strands of the book and to crystallize some moments of transcendence, moments when the world is on the cusp of escaping its own boundaries. And if it doesn't entirely succeed, well, this book's rather more interested in failure than in success. Not that Dyer celebrates failure: for all his warmth and jokiness as he describes his shortcomings and breakdowns, a few extended scenes here deal with something close to misery. But he acknowledges failure, and warmly. He sits down with it, offers it his joint, and has rather an interesting chat.
The final piece attempts to tie together several of the strands of the book and to crystallize some moments of transcendence, moments when the world is on the cusp of escaping its own boundaries. And if it doesn't entirely succeed, well, this book's rather more interested in failure than in success. Not that Dyer celebrates failure: for all his warmth and jokiness as he describes his shortcomings and breakdowns, a few extended scenes here deal with something close to misery. But he acknowledges failure, and warmly. He sits down with it, offers it his joint, and has rather an interesting chat.
February 10, 2023
Super boring, and the author seems insufferable.
August 13, 2016
One of my favorite writers, really. Here Dyer does travel-writing, art-criticism, philosophical rumination, sex, drugs, and dead-pan anomie. Forget Hunter S. Thompson -- Dyer's story of trying to change his clothes in an Amsterdam restroom after doing hallucinogenic mushrooms had me laughing so hard that my kitten was staring and patting my face concernedly.
March 4, 2017
If you know Geoff Dyer’s work, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that there is basically nothing about yoga in this book; the title is his proposed idea for a self-help book, but … wait for the punchline … he couldn’t be bothered to write it.
Instead, this is a book of disparate travel essays, several set in Southeast Asia but others in New Orleans, Paris, Miami, Rome, Amsterdam, and at the Burning Man festival. As usual, Dyer paints himself as a bumbling antihero: a hapless, gray-haired thirty- or fortysomething wandering around various tourist destinations, sluggish and stoned, alongside girlfriends with names like Dazed and Circle. I couldn’t particularly relate to his druggy, languid style of sightseeing, but he comes out with great descriptions, recreated dialogues, and one-liners that are worth hanging around for:
His natural laziness is at odds with his sense of obligation to see things while on vacation.
My two favorites are a related pair set in Leptis Magna, Libya and Detroit – two places that house ruins of different types. As he contemplates the remains of an ancient civilization and thinks about writing a book on the topic, he also thinks about the wreck he’s made of his life, including a series of broken relationships. Not one of Dyer’s best, but still a pleasant book to have sat on the coffee table so you can pick it up and read an occasional essay.
Instead, this is a book of disparate travel essays, several set in Southeast Asia but others in New Orleans, Paris, Miami, Rome, Amsterdam, and at the Burning Man festival. As usual, Dyer paints himself as a bumbling antihero: a hapless, gray-haired thirty- or fortysomething wandering around various tourist destinations, sluggish and stoned, alongside girlfriends with names like Dazed and Circle. I couldn’t particularly relate to his druggy, languid style of sightseeing, but he comes out with great descriptions, recreated dialogues, and one-liners that are worth hanging around for:
“It was quite nice being at the waterfall [Kuang Si, Laos]: worth going to, but we wouldn’t have rated it higher than that.” (a good example of the British meaning of quite [somewhat] vs. the American connotation [very])
“Although dressed like a gas pump attendant on a space station – her trousers, manufactured from some ultra-synthetic heat- and cold-resistant fabric, consisted entirely of pockets – she had a Parisian fondness for debate and strident argument.”
“at some level I knew that I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even less idea of what I wanted from life now than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, that I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that that was fine by me.”
His natural laziness is at odds with his sense of obligation to see things while on vacation.
“I have been bored for much of my life, by many things but, equally, I have also been fantastically interested by many other things. Antiquity represented a weird synthesis – a kind of short circuit – of these two currents of my life: for the first time ever I was bored by what I was interested in. I didn’t fight it.”
“I lay in bed, preoccupied by the age-old questions of travel: why does one do it? what am I doing here? These questions generated a third: what do I want out of life? The answer to which was: to be back home, to stay put, to stay in, to put my feet up, to watch telly.”
“There is a meteorological curse on me. Weather systems rearrange themselves around my presence. Fronts move in. Areas of low pressure build up. I arrive somewhere, it begins raining.”
My two favorites are a related pair set in Leptis Magna, Libya and Detroit – two places that house ruins of different types. As he contemplates the remains of an ancient civilization and thinks about writing a book on the topic, he also thinks about the wreck he’s made of his life, including a series of broken relationships. Not one of Dyer’s best, but still a pleasant book to have sat on the coffee table so you can pick it up and read an occasional essay.
April 11, 2007
Something about a guy who writes almost completely about not writing, being mad at himself for not writing, and about the minutia of his own life that I both love and hate. Mostly love, though, and I hate that about it.
October 18, 2020
Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It is a book that defies genre, a book about author Geoff Dyer's travels (sort of), Dyer's thoughts about life (kinda), a book of essays (somewhat), a memoir (after a fashion). In any case, Dyer takes us with him to Cambodia and South Beach and Libya (Libya?) and a bunch of other places, and he shares some brilliant thoughts about these places and the people he's with and the universe, usually while he's under the influence of alcohol or drugs or both. And he's oddly funny.
June 12, 2015
I liked the first piece in this collection, but became more and more bored and frustrated as I read on. Unless you're a teenager intent on picking up tips about how to get stoned and get laid around the world, there really isn't much there. Initially you get the impression that the author is rather proud of having spent so much of his life drifting around in a stupor, then you realize that he feels he's been battling depression all along. My interest perked up a bit when he describes some of his symptoms in "The Rain Inside": "Ten hours was not enough to get anything done because it wasn't really ten hours, it was just billions of bits of time, each one far too small to do anything with." However, on the whole, these essays, for want of a better word, don't add up to much. Considered as travel writing, they fall short, but they rate even more poorly if you expect something more substantive. The prose is firm enough, and it's strewn with arresting quotations, but mostly it's just whining about one guy's angst.
May 23, 2012
I had Geoff Dyer on my list for a while, having already read some of his brilliant pieces here and there, but nothing like a full book. And ain't I happy I did pick it up?
Dyer takes travel writing to a different plane, then again, this isn't really travel writing. It could rather be called writing while traveling -- and he seems to be the perfect guy to keep traveling, never really at rest anywhere, and at the same time at home everywhere, a kind of anti-buddha.
A cross between beat literature -- a modern day on the road -- and stand up comedy directed at the stand up comedian and hit-and-run philosophical ruminations, Dyer keeps you riveted to his effortless (for the reader) prose.
Dyer takes travel writing to a different plane, then again, this isn't really travel writing. It could rather be called writing while traveling -- and he seems to be the perfect guy to keep traveling, never really at rest anywhere, and at the same time at home everywhere, a kind of anti-buddha.
A cross between beat literature -- a modern day on the road -- and stand up comedy directed at the stand up comedian and hit-and-run philosophical ruminations, Dyer keeps you riveted to his effortless (for the reader) prose.
February 19, 2015
Yuck. I'd forgotten that I hadn't liked one of Dyer's other books, i.e. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, when I bought this book. Here's an example of one of the author's brilliant insights: "At first I wondered why the few kids slouching around were all so short. Then I realized it was because they hadn't finished growing yet" (210). I can't be bothered to read any more of this author's writing.
September 3, 2016
É o segundo livro que leio do autor e certamente não será o último, até porque o próximo já está comprado. Ele tem um jeito muito envolvente de contar estórias comuns e consegue te colocar dentro do livro, do cenário e das emoções vivenciadas.
Este livro narra diferentes viagens, com suas sensações e comentários divertidos e inteligentes.
Recomendo especialmente os capítulos sobre Roma, Leptis Magna e o Burning Man que vem acompanhados de insights muito especiais.
Este livro narra diferentes viagens, com suas sensações e comentários divertidos e inteligentes.
Recomendo especialmente os capítulos sobre Roma, Leptis Magna e o Burning Man que vem acompanhados de insights muito especiais.
January 7, 2010
pretty good philosophy book, kind of funny and super-hipster ironic. but not really a very good book describing places and traveling. for all ironic hipster fans, everybody else probably won't be too thrilled. writing style is talking heads style of playing their songs. oh yes, i forgot, good drug and sex descriptions too. what everybody needs to make their philosophy go down.
June 2, 2013
É um livro interessante, com um humor muito irónico, e uma perspectiva muito desalinhada, nomeadamente em relação ao que conhecemos de mais habitual na literatura de viagens.
Pelas criticas do Público estava à espera de melhor, de qualquer coisa que fosse mais surpreendente e sedutora.
Mas recomendo: lê-se bem e depressa, é inteligente e divertido.
Pelas criticas do Público estava à espera de melhor, de qualquer coisa que fosse mais surpreendente e sedutora.
Mas recomendo: lê-se bem e depressa, é inteligente e divertido.
February 26, 2012
This isn't so much a travel log as it is about what is going on inside the author's head as he grasps for those transcendental moments we are all searching for and rarely experience. The book is laugh-out-loud funny in many places, witty, perplexing, and sad. I will read this author's fiction.
May 20, 2012
For those of us feeling lonely and despondent -- one can feel lonely and despondent anywhere in the world; it is our self that feels this way, and not the place that makes us so.
That doesn't help at all, does it?
That doesn't help at all, does it?
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