Geoff Dyer is one of those writers who resists categorization. His books and essays are usually a hybrid of several genres: reporting, memoir, travelogues, criticism, and humor. What makes most of them great, though, is Dyer's digressive curiosity, his ability to let one realization about his ostensible topic—D.H. Lawrence, say, or a donut—drift into some other, often personal or hilarious, thought, which then drifts into something else, perhaps adding a fart joke, on and on, until somehow you're back at the original subject, with an understanding of it that would've been impossible if Dyer had taken another, more direct route.