Delight

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay · 2019

On his forty-second birthday Gay decided to write a short essay every day for a year about something that had delighted him. He mostly managed it. The results are a page or two each: a nod from a stranger, a flower coming up through a crack, someone carrying a tomato plant onto a plane. He is a poet, and he is also writing as a Black man in America, so the book never pretends the world is benign — the delights sit right alongside grief and racism and his father’s death, which is exactly what gives them their weight. The single best book on this subject, and the one that makes you start keeping your own list.

Delight

J.B. Priestley · 1949

Priestley had spent years being described in the press as a professional grumbler, so he wrote this partly out of irritation: a hundred and fourteen very short pieces about things that had given him pleasure. Fountains. Detective stories in bed. Mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels. Not having to go. Reading in bed about foul weather. Each one runs to a page or two, and the effect of reading a few at a time is a slow recalibration of what you are looking for in a day. Written in post-war Britain by a man who had every reason to be sour, which is what gives it its authority.

Dear Mrs Bird

AJ Pearce · 2018

Emmeline Lake wants to be a war correspondent and ends up typing letters for a magazine agony aunt who refuses to answer anything Unpleasant. So Emmy starts writing back in secret. It is set during the Blitz and does not pretend the Blitz was fun, but the delight in it is real and comes from the same place delight usually comes from: friendship, cheek, and someone deciding to do a small good thing they have not been given permission to do. One of those novels that is genuinely warm without being soft.

An Everlasting Meal

Tamar Adler · 2011

Nominally a cookery book, actually a book about paying attention. Adler starts with how to boil water and works outward through what to do with the ends of things: the stalks, the stale bread, the bean water nobody keeps. Reading it makes the kitchen more interesting, which is a disproportionately large improvement to a life, given how much of it takes place in there. Very few recipes, a great deal of pleasure.

Three Men in a Boat

Jerome K. Jerome · 1889

Three friends and a dog take a boat up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford, and almost nothing of consequence occurs. Jerome meant to write a serious travel guide and kept being derailed by the tin of pineapple nobody can open, the maze at Hampton Court, the smell of the cheeses. A hundred and thirty-five years on it is still laugh-aloud funny, which almost nothing is, and it is the purest book here on the pleasure of doing something badly with people you like.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady

E.M. Delafield · 1930

A Devon housewife keeps a diary of small domestic catastrophes: the bulbs that will not flower, the bank manager, the visiting Lady Boxe who is unbearable. Delafield’s comedy comes entirely from noticing, and from the parenthetical asides in which she says what she actually thinks. Read a few pages at bedtime. It is the literary equivalent of somebody catching your eye across a tedious room.

Stargirl

Jerry Spinelli · 2000

A girl arrives at an ordinary American high school carrying a ukulele and a pet rat, sings happy birthday to strangers in the canteen and cheers for both teams. Written for teenagers and read mostly by adults, because what it is really about is how quickly a group punishes anyone who is visibly delighted by things. Worth reading if you have ever caught yourself flattening your own enthusiasm to make other people comfortable.

84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff · 1970

Twenty years of letters between a broke New York writer and a very proper London bookseller, beginning with an order for second-hand books and turning, without either of them quite intending it, into a friendship. She sends food parcels through rationing. He sends Walton and Donne. It takes about ninety minutes to read and is one of the most reliably delightful books ever published, mostly because both of them are so obviously pleased by the other one existing.