The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Rating: ★★★★☆

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay is a lovely collection of essays celebrating the small joys that brighten our lives. Gay's reflections on everyday moments are beautifully written and often deeply moving.

What really struck me about this book is Gay's ability to find delight in the ordinary and the often overlooked. His writing is poetic and heartfelt, encouraging readers to pause and savor the beauty found in simple interactions and experiences.

I appreciated Gay's perspective on joy and gratitude, which feels personal yet universally relatable. His observations are insightful, offering profound insights into human connection and the richness of daily existence.

While some essays resonated more strongly with me than others, The Book of Delights overall is a touching reminder to treasure the small pleasures that enhance our lives. Gay's prose is both comforting and thought-provoking, making this collection a delightful read that inspires reflection and gratitude.

One of the best parts of this books is its subtleties. It takes a look at the dualities of life and explores the ways in which Ross Gay himself comes to terms with these contrasts. The variety of emotions, the changes in subjects, and the personality infused on every page is what makes this book appealing.

What a happy little delight of a book! Each of the essays in this book are short and sweet. It is easy to read and a nice book to work through at a slower pace because of the way it is broken up; it allows you to focus on each subject and reflect. Loved this!!

A very special book that provided the following delights:

•a new morning ritual complement to my saucer-less albeit regular-sized coffee

•good hand feel; weight, size (lack of heft), cover texture (smooth grit?)

•charming reminders of youth; music tied to memories; and the sweetness of pleasantries & pleasant places

Thank you to @algonquinbooks for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

#bookofdelights #tiny #books #ftw

THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS by Ross Gay is literally that- a book of delightful essays that Gay wrote over the span of one year.⁠

I tabbed so many pages of this book, there are so many perfect little slices of writing- even when Gay is writing about a thing that is definitely not delightful, his way with words makes it all delightful anyway. There are also several moments where I actually laughed out loud, which is not common.
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Here are a couple of snippets that I loved:⁠
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"The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what's too high, or what's been dropped...This caretaking is our default mode, and it's always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always."⁠
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"As I write this it's occurring to me that the books I most adore are the ones that archive the people who have handled them-dogears, or old receipts used as bookmarks (always a lovely digression). Underlines and exclamation points, and this in an old library book! The tender vandalisms by which, sometimes, we express our love. Or a fingerprint, made of some kind of oil, maybe from peanut butter, which it would be If it was mine. Or a tea stain, and a note to oneself only oneself could decipher."

Thanks so much to the publisher for the NetGalley and paperback review copies!

This book was a struggle for me to get through. It's a collection of short stories, maybe a couple of them I understood and actually enjoyed, but that was only a very small amount. It just not the book for me.

🌟THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS🌟 by Ross Gay ~published 2019

Thanks so much to @algonquinbooks for the gifted finished copy (now in paperback). All thoughts are my own.

I’m not typically drawn to “feel good” books. When Algonquin offered this book of essays to me, my first thought was, who, me? Are you sure? Because lately I’ve been focused on the jarring, the essential, the deeply moving. I haven’t really been in the mood to read something “delightful,” you know?

For one year, Gay set out to write a daily essay about something delightful – a gratitude journal of sorts. He wasn’t allowed to stack delights or save them up; he chose to have faith that each new day would bring a new delight. Some are predictable (sleeping in, smelling a fragrant flower, etc.) and Gay achieves a level of gratitude that I may never reach (he views peeing his pants in his car because he couldn’t hold it anymore as a kind of delight). But the bulk of this book is so much more than the cute or the cliché.

Gay is big on the power of community. Many of the things that delight him are the moments when he witnesses people helping each other, when complete strangers say hello to him or touch him on the shoulder (his reflections on being a black man were especially powerful here), when we share the load with each other even when we are capable of doing it ourselves (he offers a touching example of a mother and child each holding one handle of a laundry basket on their walk home from the laundromat). For Gay, even revealing our deepest sorrows to each other is a kind of joy.

Apparently trees in the forest share nitrogen with each other via their root systems, distributing it to the trees that need it most. Gay writes eloquently about “the underground union between you and me.” He believes that community caretaking is our default mode, and he doesn’t want us to forget that in these politically divisive times. This was goosebumps- level powerful.

Our delight grows as we share it with others, and I am so happy to be able to share this delightful, but more importantly powerful, book with you.

a joyous essay collection hinging on the author’s ability to add levity to the difficult times we face while never displaying naïveté. affirming and optimistic, the book of delights is exactly what the title proclaims! after reading this short collection of essays, you’ll be inspired to find moments of delight in the small details too.

Communication is often fraught with misunderstanding. Sometimes it is disastrous, and sometimes hilarious. Ross Gay relates the story of going through an airport security check and chatting with the man patting him down. “I told him I was going to read poems in Syracuse,” Ross writes, noting the quizzical look on the man’s face. The man said his mother took him to have his poems read once. “I never believed in it myself,” the man concluded. As Gay left he heard the man tell a coworker, “that guy’s being flown to Syracuse to read palms!”

What a delight to read. It lifted my spirits.

Ross Gay committed to writing an essay a day, a book of delights about the day’s experiences, the people he encountered, the insights he gleaned. The loveliness of getting a high-five from a stranger, a waitress who puts her hand on his shoulder. Mistaking a man on a plane for his late great-uncle. The joy and terror of being a parent. The brevity of life. The pleasure of remembering one’s dreams. The awareness that each of us lives with some profound sorrow, yet that is also a kind of joy.

The biracial Gay grew up in Levittown, PA, a planned, segregated, community. (For three years in the early 70s I lived up the pike from that community and had visited its homes.) Some days relate darker stories of racism.

He talks about music and how a song can transport you back in time. (His song was by DeBarge, a group I was not familiar with, but discovered the mother of the group was from Royal Oak, MI, where I lived during my teenage years! That was a delight.)

The best way to read this book is day by day, allowing you to enjoy each essay.

The book is now available in paperback .

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley.

This book is full of wonderful essays of the delights Ross Gay has decided to record daily in his life. The author stays optimistic while not being blind to not so great world in each of his essays. He uses brilliant and lovely language throughout the book that just makes you want to smile while reading. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay is a heartwarming take on a way to better see the world and yourself in it. I highly recommend reading it

Little book of delights makes you start your own little book of delights. There must be something that makes us feel delighted, laugh, and stop on our tracks. This is not a serious memoir in a sense that Ross Gay says “look at my life” but it’s sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad accounts of his days between two birthdays.

“I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization-in that clear way, not that oh yeah way-that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.”

“I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you're lucky, to have stepped back from it-if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time. Then it is, too, a kind of grownness by which I see three squares of light on my wall, the shadow of a tree trembling in two of them, and hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom or horrible alignment, but simply observe the signs--light and song-for what they are light and song. And, knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.”

This is a book of essays that as the description accurately describes as short essays - some in paragraphs, some in a few pages. Although the word "delight" is in the title, not all the essays are delightful. The Author has written these essays over the course of a year, he writes about what he observes and experiences and his corresponding thoughts.

This is a collection that is best read one day at a time. It is not to be read fast but at a leisurely pace. There is a need to stop, slow down, and make time. The author is a poet and his writing ebbs and flows. With most collections, you may not enjoy every entry, but I appreciated how the author wrote down his experiences.

A collection of essays, Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is exactly as it promises: a book of delights. Gay set out on a project to record a series of ‘delights’ every day (or most days) for a year, starting and ending on his birthday.The delights range from big to small — savouring a cup of coffee, moments of serendipity, saying hello to a stranger. As someone who tends to read through books quickly, I soon realized that The Book of Delights is a book to read slowly; to meander your way through it, pause and reflect. It was then that I really appreciated The Book of Delights, and started reflecting on the things in my life that also bring me delight.

I’ll leave you here with my favorite excerpt:


I have no illusions, by which I mean to tell you it is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. ...Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design.

And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight.

Daily as air.

This delightful book was a joy to read at times. Although I did not connect with the book as a whole I did still enjoy many of the different essayettes. Most I thought were just ramblings on things that honestly after the sentences went on I just became bored. His prose is very repetitive in nature and I am not in the slightest implying that his writings are not done well in fact they are excellent just not for me. I feel that some were very disconnected from me.

Over 100 daily reflections on Gay's delights - momentary, fleeting observations of something that happened that day (someone calling him baby, or touching him affectionately), being witness to a beautiful, spontaneous act (bird-feeding and more bird-feeding), recalling memories that tickled him, that served delight, that incited warmth…

My 6th grade teacher made us journal at the end of every day which is a practice that I followed into middle school but stopped in high school. The practice of reflection, slowing down, and just being feels alien to me, as a constant doer, planner. Gay writes in #87 about loitering being unproductive and nonconsumptive, which in a capitalist society is the biggest revolt. "taking one's time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one's time, which must be wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is."

I loved delighting in these ideas. It's springboarded a desire to personally reflect and delight in my own delights, to loiter in my own thoughts without fear of self-reprimanding. I will try! (4.5)

I feel I have found a kindred spirit in the protagonist of this volume. I myself keep a diary of delights in which I tally mine and also attempt to justify a life devoted to delight, “Delight soothes sadness, calms fear, assuages anger, lessens the tenure of horror, compensates loss, ameliorates humiliation, kindles hope, inspires a love of life, fulfills a day’s experience. What shall we do today? What we did yesterday: create delightful homes, tend their gardens, cook delightful food, delight in friends, in family, and in language.”

In his book, Gay delights also in nature, which should be in the list, for sure.

So, from my perspective, Ross Gay’s book is profound. It is also poetic, in keeping with its subject. Gay doesn’t have to record that he is delighting in the language he uses. It’s manifest.

This is the second book I have begun to reread as soon as I finished it. The other was Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat, another delight.

A reader who cultivates delight may learn from this book that delight may be defiantly employed as a poke in the eye of racism, for instance, in Gay’s case. Or, if the president of the beautiful country in which you reside in an anhedonic (David Brooks’ word) teetotaler, defiantly lift your glass of first-rate pinot noir a little higher and taste with deep attention. You’ll feel better. In the rural setting where I grew up in the middle of the last century, delight was a bulwark against poverty, not an even match but often sufficient. About fabulous farm food, my dad crowed, “Now that’s what I call eating!” He was delighted by it.

I learned from Ross Gay that delight may be compounded by sharing. Thanks.

The Book of Delights is a well curated short essay collection on the nature of delight/joy by Ross Gay. Released in Feb 2019 by Algonquin, it's 288 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats, with a paperback due out 16th Aug. 2022.

The author began and ended the year's ruminations on life, joy, the realities of daily life, patterns in our daily routines (and the immediate joy of occasionally breaking them) on his birthday. It became a habit, an exercising, he says in the preface of a "delight radar", a muscle, and it's a treat. Much of the prose is luminous and on dreary days, gave me a small boost. It was a joy to read. I would recommend sampling essays rather than a cover to cover binge, but I admittedly did just that, thinking "just one more" until I had read it all. I've revisited the collection several times since that initial read, however, and the re-readability is very high.

This book is what the "Chicken Soup" books would've been in a much better, more intellectual world. There aren't any platitudes, no saccharine falseness, just an intelligent man's observations about the nature of the universe and our zany unpredictable place in it. It both is, and isn't, poetry. I've heard that authors expose their inner selves in their creative works, and if that's true - what a lovely person Dr. Gay must be.

This would make a superlative choice for public library acquisition, for gifting to discerning friends, and for the home library. There are books in most bibliophiles' libraries which come and go. I believe this one will be sticking around in mine, at least.

Five stars. Profound and intimately kind, philosophical and generous.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

The Book of Delights is by far the most unique strongly written book I have read this year. It stands on it's own and it feels non invasive when reading it when in other things in the personal essays that have none comparability since this stands on its own. They language is strong and comes off as friendly and sometimes humorous. I feel when I am reading it's like a friend is telling me an eloquent story. I could dissect metaphors forever in this book and I definitely plan to reread it. To be able to balance style and language without one over shadowing another and keep the personal friendly I think is a feat upon itself.

This book is part of a book tour with #Algonquin Books. I am happy they offered me a chance to read it I needed some refreshing new reads. I also appreciate Netgalley working with Algonquin Books. I was offered this Arc in exchange for an honest review. Please check it out!

Very enjoyable and insightful. I loved the short chapters This book made me want to note the small joys in my every day life.

A lovely collection of essays, in which the author chronicled daily delights for a year. I especially liked the "ancillary delights" included in many of the essays. Even so, the collection touches on important and not-so-delightful subjects, like racism, so it is definitely not saccharine. Highly recommend!