Geoff Dyer is a man who "lives in London where he spends much of his time wishing he lived in San Francisco." That's what it says on the jacket of "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It," and it's exactly the feeling of restlessness one gets from Dyer's most recent book

Cambodia, Libya, New Orleans, Bali, Amsterdam, Detroit - "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It" is more of a travelogue than the Self-Helplessness book suggested by its title. But the journey logged is less geographical than psychological - an edgy ramble through the mind of the author as world traveler. In these 11 short vignettes, Dyer recounts vividly the particulars of a decade of wanderlust. Instead of a sequential narrative, Dyer gives us, "an endless accretion - a kind of negative archeology - of material."

Geoff Dyer is something of a drifter, as the title of the first piece, "Horizontal Drift," suggests. He takes his loneliness, his listlessness, and his general self-dissatisfaction with him wherever he goes, along with his Tevas. He treads among the details, finding evidence of the sublime therein and relaying it to his readers. A haircut in Cambodia: "This barber had only one leg and spoke no English, but his ability to cut my hair - which he did skillfully, with considerable pride - was in no way compromised by either lack."

Dyer seems to glide effortlessly through landscape after landscape, despite himself, pulling the reader along with oftentimes deliciously palpable descriptions.

"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 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 colonizing impulse."