I'll read anything under New York Magazine book critic Kathryn Schulz's byline—up to and including an essay about her relationship with Twitter, something I would categorically ignore from just about any other writer.

Her review of Geoff Dyer's new book Another Great Day at Sea, about Dyer's residency aboard the USS George HW Bush, is just about a perfect example of the form: Thoughtful, playful, deeply engaged with Dyer's book on a sentence-by-sentence level while never losing sight of the larger context of his work.

However you might imagine a fighter pilot would sound on the page—headlong like Kerouac, maybe, or terse like Hemingway, or controlled like Graham Greene—Dyer definitely does not sound that way. He sounds lazy, distractible, neurotic, indecisive—basically like everything you do not want near the cockpit of a plane.

Probably you do not even want Dyer near your military. There is no chance in hell he would pass a drug test. There is no chance in hell he would not, as they say, fraternize. There is every chance he would go awol, since he’s always leaving somewhere to amble (though more anxiously than that sounds) someplace else: France, Italy, Indonesia, Cambodia, Algeria, America. In short, if you have never read Dyer, you should not be imagining an unusually erudite young Tom Cruise. You should be imagining W. G. Sebald in Monty Python, or Montaigne on cocaine.

"Montaigne on cocaine"! Read the whole review, please, and then mark your calendar: Geoff Dyer will be at Powell's on Tuesday, June 3.