The UC Santa Barbara Library and the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor are pleased to announce the selection of the 2025 UCSB Reads book, The Book of Delights: Essays by Ross Gay.
Now in its 19th year, UCSB Reads is an award-winning program that brings the campus and Santa Barbara communities together to read a common book that explores compelling issues of our time.
A New York Times bestseller, The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of short lyrical essays that celebrate the small, ordinary wonders in the world around us. Written daily over one tumultuous year, the humorous, poetic, and philosophical essays cover a wide range of topics that will feel familiar to readers. Among Gay’s delights: a high five from a stranger, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room. Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic impacts of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. Yet the book serves as a powerful reminder that staking out a space in our lives for joy brings us closer together. According to Ploughshares, “The Book of Delights restores pleasure as a site of serious thought and, even more, as a mode in inquiry in itself, while Gay’s wholesome (but never saccharine) voice convinces us that a mode of inquiry, a way of thinking, too, can be a pleasure itself.”
Ross Gay is an award-winning poet, essayist, and professor. He is the author of four books of poetry and three collections of essays, including the follow-up The Book of (More) Delights. He is the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Award, and 2022 Indiana Authors Award for Poetry. Gay has taught poetry, art, and literature at Lafayette College, Montclair State University, Drew University, and Indiana University, where he is a faculty member in the English Department.
UCSB Reads 2025 will launch in January with a free book giveaway for students. Throughout the winter and spring quarters, the Library will sponsor talks, book clubs, workshops, and other learning, experiential, and social events to explore the book’s themes. Instructors are encouraged to incorporate The Book of Delights into their winter or spring courses. The Library will provide free copies of the book to all students who are assigned to read it as part of coursework.
UCSB Reads will culminate with a free talk by the author at Campbell Hall on May 8, 2025. This public lecture is presented in partnership with UCSB Arts & Lectures.
If you wish to teach the book, participate in UCSB Reads programming, or support UCSB Reads 2025, please email UCSBReads@library.ucsb.edu.
For up-to-date details about UCSB Reads events, sponsors, and more, go to www.library.ucsb.edu/ucsbreads2025.
Thank you for joining us as we explore this engaging and provocative book as a community.
David Marshall, Executive Vice Chancellor, and Alan Grosenheider, Interim University Librarian
