
The Book of Delights
Essays
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Narrated by:
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Ross Gay
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By:
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Ross Gay
About this listen
The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays - some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages - that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.
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- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
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Unexpected story
- By Steve Mowe on 03-10-25
By: Martin MacInnes
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The Power of Fun
- How to Feel Alive Again
- By: Catherine Price
- Narrated by: Catherine Price
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist and screen/life balance expert Catherine Price argues persuasively that our always-on, tech-addicted lifestyles have led us to obsess over intangible concepts such as happiness while obscuring the fact that real happiness lies in the everyday experience of fun. We often think of fun as indulgent, even immature and selfish. We claim to not have time for it, even as we find hours a day for what Price calls Fake Fun—bingeing on television, doomscrolling the news, or posting photos to social media, all in hopes of filling some of the emptiness we feel inside.
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Maybe I’m not the target audience
- By JK on 12-24-21
By: Catherine Price
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The Best of Me
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 25 years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to listen without laughing.
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Almost No New Material
- By Lizardectomy on 11-05-20
By: David Sedaris
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Headshot
- A Novel
- By: Rita Bullwinkel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.
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Wonderful Narrator
- By love it on 08-09-24
By: Rita Bullwinkel
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Birnam Wood
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Catton
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
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Outstanding thriller w/ exceptional character development
- By Bradley T. Collins on 04-21-23
By: Eleanor Catton
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It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
- By: Anne de Marcken
- Narrated by: Jessica Preddy
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.
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The manner of which this book was written
- By Vanessa on 03-31-25
By: Anne de Marcken
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The History of Sound
- Stories
- By: Ben Shattuck
- Narrated by: Ben Shattuck, Zachary Chastain, Paul Mescal, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
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Gorgeous written connected stories
- By Briana R. on 07-22-24
By: Ben Shattuck
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Flight Behavior
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.
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A poignant literary work of art.
- By criswithcurls on 02-08-13
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How to Do Nothing
- Resisting the Attention Economy
- By: Jenny Odell
- Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity...doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance. So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Our attention is the most precious - and overdrawn - resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and find more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
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great book, voiceover is brutal
- By Anonymous User on 08-24-19
By: Jenny Odell
What listeners say about The Book of Delights
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-17-24
Truly a delight
A few crude parts which, for me, added to the delight. Easy funny moving read.
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- Elizabeth Knox
- 04-21-22
Absolutely delightful
Yes, it is certainly cliché to call the book of delights absolutely delightful however, that is just what this book is.
If you like short prose, interesting words and authenticity, this book is for you.
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- Archmage of Books
- 05-19-22
Ross Gay Reading Makes It Better
I enjoy the Book of Delights and often give it as a gift. I got the audio book to listen to at work as a way squeeze in a few smiles and remind me to be delighted everyday. However, hearing Ross Gay read - the cadence of his voice along with the infections made the book even more delightful. #TotallyDelighted
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- D. M. Lee
- 07-03-21
like poetry to lift
but poetry to lift your attitude every single day every single time I listen. thank you Ross for everything in your life that brought you to the place to be able to write this book.
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- Nicholas
- 04-03-23
Good for the soul. Good for the ears.
What. A. Privilege and a delight to listen to this compilation of essays. My heart is lighter. And my days are brighter.
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- Kris
- 06-16-23
Sigh :)
It’s everything you didn’t know you needed to hear. Stop going through life on autopilot. This book takes you on a journey and opens your eyes to all of the delights you may be missing. I’m hooked on Ross Gay’s books!
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- Taylor
- 07-17-23
Inspiring
This book makes you want to seek pleasure in normal daily occurrences that you may not usually notice or bring awareness to. An investigation of joy. It made me want to start my own book of delights.
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- Kathy F.
- 12-04-23
A bit uneven.
I found several of the essays truly delightful! Others, not so much. The author's performance was very good. I just ordered one of his poetry books.
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- NA
- 06-25-24
Will carry in my soul
I graduated from IU just a few years ago, so I knew of Ross Gay, though I never took his classes — too busy trying to cram two degrees into four years — but I regret that. When the world is full of more loss and sorrow than I can often bear, I turn to these delights. There is a particularly nostalgia, delight, here for me — reflecting on Darn Good Soup (lost to Covid-19) and the curious Protestantism of the dogwoods. Kin, kind, I love you, Book of Delights.
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- Maggie
- 05-10-20
such a treat
this is a book I'm sure I'll be revisiting over and over. it's was a joy to get lost in and a dose of pleasantness Everytime I listened to it
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