This is all on me. I read this too slow and it returned itself to the library before I could jot down my highlighted lines. I am not a digital highlighter AT ALL but I flagged at least four spots in here because the language was just that damn good and now they’re GONE.
I read this slow because, well, I wasn’t sure I was going to finish it. I was about 40% through and just like “Ugh, okay, I’ll make it halfway, that’s good enough” because it just wasn’t grabbing me. Ross Gay set himself to write an essay a day for a year about the small delights in his life and frankly I was bored for a very long time. There aren’t 365 essays in here, more like 100, but they are each marked with the day on which they were written and they are filed in chronological order and I’m not exactly sure how or when but a switch flipped for me and all of a sudden I was utterly obsessed.
For the first half of the book, I found his prose very grating. It felt like he was more about how he was using the language than what he was trying to say, to such an extent that his flowery paragraphs utterly obscured any point they might have had. To me, anyway. But somehow, that changed, and I fell in love. The experience of reading this book is going to make me think twice about bailing on any others down the line which kind of sucks because that was something I had so recently given myself permission to do.
Ah well. This one was worth it.