On October 25, 2025 I had blogged about An intriguing book by Ross Gay with 14 essays about inciting joy. Before that, in 2019, he had published another little 274-page book with 102 essays titled The Book of Delights. There is a preview through page 24 at Google Books. His preface says:
“One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.
I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules mad it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.
Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up. For instance, I traveled quite a bit this year. I often write in cafes. My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.
It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights. I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows – much like love and joy – when I share it.”
There is an article by Christina Cala at npr codeswitch on August 19, 2021 titled How Ross Gay Finds Joy in the Smallest of ‘Delights’. And there also is a four-minute YouTube video at AlgonquinBooksTV on November 6, 2018 titled The Book of Delights by Ross Gay where he reads from #80 Tomato on Board and #96 The Marfa Lights.
The very brief Essay #56 on page 154 is titled My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine. It is about the 1976 Roy Ayers song Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which you can listen to here (and find the lyrics). Ross says:
“Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it , and everybody loves it, and folks get brown in it, and folks get down in it, and most convincingly to me, and that which elevates it to the metaphysical, even the holy: just bees and things and flowers.”
The 1974 mural by Dieter M. Weidenbach came from here at Wikimedia Commons.
