“I have an idea for a self help-book,” I said. “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.”

“But you can’t be bothered to write it, right?”

This isn’t a self-help book, but it is a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In mordantly funny and thought-provoking prose, the author of Out of Sheer Rage describes a life most of us would love to live—and how much that life frustrates and aggravates him. From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and losing himself in moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experience leads, ultimately, to the Zone: to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where—to quote Tarkovsky’s Stalker—“your most cherished desire will come true.”

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It is a chronicle of how Geoff Dyer learned to feel completely at home in a state of perpetual arrival and departure.