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

Rating:
Summary: .....used books shipment
Review: ...I wish I have read this book already but it took a month for me to get it. The backage arrived all dirty and destroy. So, I hope the book is worth the wait! I if you want to get a used book you might want to go to the used bookstore! I will never buy thru this system ...just terrible

Rating:
Summary: It's not what you think
Review: Don't buy this book if you're looking for some version of Yoga Lite. It's actually a serious collection of personal essays that chronicle globe-trotting Geoff Dyer's travels between the ages of 20-40. As such, it's really a story about growing up, maturing into some version of adulthood, coming to piece with what Is. Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It is not about yoga - but it IS about finding inner peace.

Rating:
Summary: Drug hazed travels
Review: Dyer's wonderful, drug haze of 'travel essays' depend on decisive comments, deliberately undermined by doubt added, almost as an afterthought, at the end of most sentences. He's a man who you suspect is going to throw five dollar words at you, who always opts for the simple route. This lends a friendly, emotional warmth to his writing that relaxes you, lets him sidle right up to you before you begin to understand that his writing is perhaps more subversive, and more aggressive than you'd think. Dyer's essays can be genuinely funny, for instance, the moment while constantly changing rooms in a run down Miami hotel, changing again and again because of vicious mice, cigarette smells, and a French woman he finds sitting on his toilet. It's all delivered in a paragraph, so quickly that you have to stop to enjoy your laughter. The book sustains a naive quality that keeps Dyer's sense of the world fresh. Perhaps his only weakness is that his prose is much stronger than his dialogue. His dialogue can take ten lines to make a point, or reach the laugh, something he can often achieve in a single line of prose.

Rating:
Summary: Drug hazed travels
Review: Dyer's wonderful, drug haze of `travel essays' depend on decisive comments, deliberately undermined by doubt added, almost as an afterthought, at the end of most sentences. He's a man who you suspect is going to throw five dollar words at you, who always opts for the simple route. This lends a friendly, emotional warmth to his writing that relaxes you, lets him sidle right up to you before you begin to understand that his writing is perhaps more subversive, and more aggressive than you'd think. Dyer's essays can be genuinely funny, for instance, the moment while constantly changing rooms in a run down Miami hotel, changing again and again because of vicious mice, cigarette smells, and a French woman he finds sitting on his toilet. It's all delivered in a paragraph, so quickly that you have to stop to enjoy your laughter. The book sustains a naive quality that keeps Dyer's sense of the world fresh. Perhaps his only weakness is that his prose is much stronger than his dialogue. His dialogue can take ten lines to make a point, or reach the laugh, something he can often achieve in a single line of prose.

Rating:
Summary: This guy is really full of it
Review: From YOGA: "However green the accompanying vegetation, the brightest green of all was still found in the rice paddy. To become truly itself the rice had to be surrounded by the deepest lushest greens, thereby obliging the paddy to achieve that extra degree of greenness of which only it was capable. There could be only one winner. Relatively speaking only the rice paddy was really green. Only the rice paddy *hummed* with green."

Okay, Geoff. If you say so. But just do me one favor, will ya. The next time you quote someone else quoting Rilke in the original French or the original German, be a mensch a provide your audience with an English translation.

From YOGA: "I had two really powerful reactions when I saw you standing there."/"What were they?"/"I'll tell you what they were, but if it's okay, I won't tell you the order in which they ocurred."/"Okay."/"One was overwhelming relief that it was you that got stung and not me."

In case you didn't know, there's a name for that particular emotional reaction. I call it schadenrelief. (As opposed to schadenfreude.)

My favorite sentence in the book: "The water was filthy but little patches of slime and ooze had coagulated to form conurbations of superconcentrated filth."

Rating:
Summary: Great stories!
Review: Funny and interesting essays from a guy searching for something even HE can't put a finger on. Dyer's a modern day nomad, a wanderer who shares stories of a life most of us only dream of living. Wish I could quit my job and do the same!
Other good books of men on a quest are NO ONE'S EVEN BLEEDING and DELANO.

Rating:
Summary: A middle-aged slacker's guide to the universe. And more!
Review: Geoff Dyer is brilliant and hilarious. I couldn't put it down. One of the best things I've read in awhile. This is a collection of travel essays, and yet it's not. His approach to travel seems to be one of getting stoned so that one may enter the mundane. And he writes about the mundane as if it were the most fascinating place in the world. Forget travel guide books. Just go someplace and do nothing. And after awhile the nothing becomes something. I think you have to be a bit bent to enjoy this book. And if you are, you'll love Dyer's offbeat view of the world. I did.

Rating:
Summary: Nostalgic for Grey
Review: I have almost no interest in meeting anyone famous. There are many writers, artists, or actors that I appreciate, but given the chance to meet them I wouldn't have anything to say. I would, however, like to meet Geoff Dyer. Not that he would be fun to hang out with, with his tendancy to go on with himself. Or he'd be quite fun, i don't know. But the main thing is, he's on to a search, which I admire. Dyer is approaching middle age, yet he is STILL on to the search. I don't mean the search for happiness. Happiness and Dyer do not get along. Here is the example of somebody with enough self-awareness to realize the potholes in the logic of desire, and, at the same time, the detriment of that awareness - that one can never BE in one's body, in the moment (too much in one's head perhaps). He's driven to near madness by his own discontent, but somehow he makes that madness is his fuel. What's the search for then? Maybe that's what I'd ask him. It's the zone, it's whatever drives one to write or do whatever it is that distracts one from writing. If I ever met Dyer, I'd like to pass him my copy of Walker Percy's, 'The Moviegoer'. I think Percy's protagonist and Mr. Dyer have a similar line of inquiry. For me, this inquiry resonates soundly with my own personal aversion to life's routines, that and an unhealthy obsession with the elastic quality of time in relation to experience. P.S. Why isn't this guy more popular in the US. He's amazing.

Rating:
Summary: What would Rilke say about this review?
Review: I love Geoff Dyer, but this is not his best book. Consisting of stories that take place around the globe and which may or may not have happened or may not have happened quite as presented(the "genre-bending" the publishers are pushing, but anyone whose read autobiographical material... Spalding Gray, Bertrand Russell is aware of the may (not) have happened factor), the stories are Dyer's trademark style and sense of humor unevenly applied. Some of the stories ("Miss Cambodia") are simply excellent. Others are good stories peppered with far too much name checking of other authors ("Leptis Magna") and still others ("The Infinite Edge") are just simply mired in pretentious navel-gazing.

To take the latter, the author is in South-east Asia, but aside from the fact that it's ever-so-green (the first thing anyone notices about the region), there is nothing remotely remarkable about the setting. It is as though Dyer hopped half way around the world to hang around with Western backpackers (which is, I suppose, what all backpackers do, but I digress). Then, to top it off, he (rather, a character) quotes Rilke! So narrator-Geoff has traveled to the ends of the earth to quote Western authors with European backpackers? Ech. It's why people shudder at tourists. Even in "Miss Cambodia," narrator-Geoff admits that he can't distinguish between one temple and the next, but from all the Western quotes sprinkled throughout it becomes apparent that narrator-Geoff has no way to relate to his exotic settings because he knows nothing about them. He only knows a corpus of Occidental thought, DWEM's if you will.

One of the things that made "Out of Sheer Rage" so good was that every location imparted some meaning to narrator-Geoff, every event had an impact central to an intellectual development. Too often in "Yoga" the settings have no meaning whatsoever because they have no purpose for the narrator.

Having gotten my complaints out, I must say that many of the stories had me laughing out loud. The humor is quite self-deprecating in a very un-Bill Bryson way (thank goodness). "Leptis Magna" may lose its momentum navel gazing, but anyone who has ever travelled to a North African country can relate to the author's predicaments and culture barriers.

In short, it's worth reading after you've completed Dyer's better work. Just don't expect to have your Tevas knocked off.

Rating:
Summary: What would Rilke say about this review?
Review: I love Geoff Dyer, but this is not his best book. Consisting of stories that take place around the globe and which may or may not have happened or may not have happened quite as presented(the "genre-bending" the publishers are pushing, but anyone whose read autobiographical material... Spalding Gray, Bertrand Russell is aware of the may (not) have happened factor), the stories are Dyer's trademark style and sense of humor unevenly applied. Some of the stories ("Miss Cambodia") are simply excellent. Others are good stories peppered with far too much name checking of other authors ("Leptis Magna") and still others ("The Infinite Edge") are just simply mired in pretentious navel-gazing.

To take the latter, the author is in South-east Asia, but aside from the fact that it's ever-so-green (the first thing anyone notices about the region), there is nothing remotely remarkable about the setting. It is as though Dyer hopped half way around the world to hang around with Western backpackers (which is, I suppose, what all backpackers do, but I digress). Then, to top it off, he (rather, a character) quotes Rilke! So narrator-Geoff has traveled to the ends of the earth to quote Western authors with European backpackers? Ech. It's why people shudder at tourists. Even in "Miss Cambodia," narrator-Geoff admits that he can't distinguish between one temple and the next, but from all the Western quotes sprinkled throughout it becomes apparent that narrator-Geoff has no way to relate to his exotic settings because he knows nothing about them. He only knows a corpus of Occidental thought, DWEM's if you will.

One of the things that made "Out of Sheer Rage" so good was that every location imparted some meaning to narrator-Geoff, every event had an impact central to an intellectual development. Too often in "Yoga" the settings have no meaning whatsoever because they have no purpose for the narrator.

Having gotten my complaints out, I must say that many of the stories had me laughing out loud. The humor is quite self-deprecating in a very un-Bill Bryson way (thank goodness). "Leptis Magna" may lose its momentum navel gazing, but anyone who has ever travelled to a North African country can relate to the author's predicaments and culture barriers.

In short, it's worth reading after you've completed Dyer's better work. Just don't expect to have your Tevas knocked off.