Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Geoff Dyer (2003)

THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

Geoff Dyer followed Out of Sheer Rage with another acerbically funny series of stories about his travels and his chase for interesting experiences.  The book is a casual philosophical commentary on life, fueled by a love of drugs and apathy, with virtually nothing to do with yoga.  This quest takes Dyer to short stays in New Orleans & Rome, a visit to the first ever Detroit Electronic Music Festival, trips to Cambodia, Thailand and Bali, ending with his experience at Black Rock Desert at the Burning Man Festival.  Highlights include his trip to the ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya, having avoided all knowledge of the history of the place to purposely use ignorance as an investigative tool, and a rambling day in Amsterdam and his subsequent attempt to get back to the hotel after taking a few magic mushrooms.  Dyer himself explains that everything in his book really happened but that some of the things happened only in his head, and perhaps that is what makes Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It such a witty and funny travel book.  
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ABOUT GEOFF DYER

Geoff Dyer is a British author of both novels and non-fiction, with books on travel, art, literature, music, and the human condition.  His work covers a wide range of topics, but his style is always funny and insightful.  Although not best known as a travel writer, Geoff Dyer has written two excellent travelogues.  His first book, Out of Sheer Rage (1997), has received rave reviews as one of the funniest travel books ever published.  Dyer has published four novels and several non-fiction works on music, art, and literature, and he is a regular contributor to many publications both in the UK and the US.  

GREAT QUOTES:

“We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.”   
- Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

“Delightfully original… Dyer’s writing brims with off-beat insights that had me chuckling hours later, or reading aloud to dinner companions…Whether or not they happened as Dyer describes, his meanderings – and his head – make for a wonderfully rich country to wander around.”
- Tony Horwitz, author of Blue Latitudes

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