“What you don't know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane”, Ross Gay writes, “is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you're carrying a baby.”
Gay’s award-winning essay collection, The Book of Delights, is the product of a yearlong experiment in which he wrote an essay a day about something that delighted him. The result is an anthology of small, mundane joys, each captured carefully in vibrant, effusive prose. Joy is found in a hummingbird’s flight, the sight of a man roller-skating, and the casual delight of high-fiving a stranger, and as you read, you start to realize that delight isn’t a circumstantial occurrence, but a practice to be cultivated—a garden to be nurtured. As Gay puts it, “the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study."
The language in this book is a delight in itself. It’s vivid, eclectic, and unabashedly tender, and has the warm familiarity of a conversation. There’s a joyous verbosity to Gay’s words—an indulgence in long, meandering tangents that revel in their journeys more than their destinations. They’re also not particularly concerned with concision, which was my main criticism of the book. While Gay’s digressions were enjoyable in small doses, they did tire me out a little when I read more than a handful of essays at once. But my favorite thing about this collection is how many possible ways there are of enjoying it. I started off reading it cover-to-cover like a novel, but as I got to know the book better, I found myself flipping backwards and forwards to the titles that excited me most and savoring, one at a time, the small and unique joys they presented.
Despite Gay’s optimism, it would be a lie to say that he’s blind to suffering. The essays in this book don’t flinch from his encounters with grief, racism, and toxic masculinity, and although he doesn’t force joy into situations where there’s none to be found, he always finds the hope in the dark. In that way, the delight he describes never feels idealised. It’s always something you can grasp.
All in all? The Book of Delights is a powerful reminder that the world around us is ripe with wonder, and an infectious invitation to go seek it. Read the book. In times like these, we could all do with a little more delight.
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