UKC

Steinbeck for me...

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.”

-Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

That's what you call an opening paragraph!

Just thought I'd just juxtapose a lighter alternative thread to the 'most horrific thing you've read' thread. Please do add your own favourites because I'm not especially well read and I read less and less as the years tick by.

(Edited for typos)

A wonderful book - would be right up there for me too.

Also the chapter in Wind in Willows where Mole goes home - Dulce Domum 

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river! And now it was sending out its scouts and its messengers to capture him and bring him in. Since his escape on that bright morning he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

Interesting - i was about to say ‘Wind in the Willows’ but you beat me to it. It’s almost in a class of its own for cheer charm combined with innocent intensity of emotion.

Your definition of delightful must be different from mine.

The picnic Ratty packs for the Sea Rat:

'That is indeed an excellent suggestion,' said the Water Rat, and hurried off home. There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes. Thus laden, he returned with all speed, and blushed for pleasure at the old seaman's commendations of his taste and judgment, as together they unpacked the basket and laid out the contents on the grass by the roadside.

For me, 

On Foot Through the Peak; Or, A Summer Saunter Among the Hills and Dales of Derbyshire
Book by James Croston

Written nearly 200 years ago, Just delightful, you can picture the places and almost smell the spring and summer foliage.

Reading the letter which informed me of a tax rebate from the French tax office!

I'll take the pop-shot on the chin . However, what's YOUR definition of delightful? More specifically, what text lifts you up and puts you in a great mood?

Pooh!
I mean, you're not wrong of course.  But also Pooh.  (All four volumes.)

Oh - and I just thought of a short story called "Chivalry", by Neil Gaiman.  It's rather whimsical and written in very simple English so it reads like a story written for children, but it really isn't.  (Not unlike his novel, "Stardust".) 
It's very sweet and slightly poignant.

The story concerns a nice old lady, Mrs Whitaker, who finds the Holy Grail in a charity shop and buys it for 30p because she thinks it'll look nice on the mantelpiece next to her china basset hound and photo of her late husband.  And then, a day or two later, a knight (with shining armour and a big white horse) turns up looking for it.

I thought your quote was a good way of establishing that ‘delightful’ can be many things in this context. Delightful writing can compel you on the basis of sheer style and flair, not just the pleasure and warmth engendered by the content. 

I just posted a link to the blog of a sea kayaker on a different thread.  A lady by the name of Pen Godber who recently set herself the challenge of paddling to, and spending the night on, 77 different islands before the end of her 77th year.  (Which will be late Oct 2028.)

This is her account of a solo trip around Eilean Nan Ron, which is delightful:

https://www.77islands.org/post/eilean-nan-ron

Puckoon by Spike Milligan never ceases to lift my spirits.

Thanks for posting that link - really enjoyed reading it.  I can see I'll be spending a lot of time catching up with her adventures.

A Short walk in the Hindu Kush . It started something.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin. I first read it 40 years ago, and re read it every few years since. The writing is close to poetry, the world evoked is vivid and compelling, and there is depth and wisdom in it far beyond its “young adult” label. 
 

indeed, to be honest, just about everything Le Guin has written. Every word feels chosen carefully, and fits perfectly. 

click, hum...

http://kalantarian.org/artak/Literature/errorhandling.htm

Mine is from Blood Meridien, which was also my choice for most harrowing too. 

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

 Cormac McCarthy

Also Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson. 
It’s a magical collection of words that stops you dead in admiration, like a light of understanding turning on inside. 

The Dalai Lama’s Cat was pretty sweet.

Especially if you own a cat yourself as the mannerisms are spot on

Nice intro into Buddhism light too…

I'm a great admirer of the writing of W H Murray and this gorgeous passage captures as well as anything I've ever read the sensation of transcendence one can sometimes experience while climbing. I love the paradox of the hush you can hear and the phrase the wave-beat of the sea of beauty. It's a complex and powerful metaphor that repays time spent exploring it. It's the conclusion of The First Ascent of Parallel Buttress, Lochnagar, from Mountaineering in Scotland, 1947:

At five o’clock we stepped onto the summit and passed, as it were, into another realm. Far beneath our feet a mighty expanse of tawny hills and plains stretched to the utmost fringes of the earth, and faded there in unfathomable blue. Over all hung the breathless hush of evening. One heard it circle the world like a lapping tide, the wave-beat of the sea of beauty; and as we listened from our watch tower and looked out across the broad earth, our own little lives and our flush of triumph in climbing a new route became very trivial things. They were suddenly measured for us against eternity and the real, and in such perspective vanished away, of no moment. Yet in that same instant our climb on the granite crags, the bare summit and the lands below, were with ourselves idealised as though in a point out of time and exalted in oneness. We began to understand, a little less darkly, what it may mean to inherit the earth.

Quo Vadis- Henryk Sienkiewicz

I'm not religious but this story is so beautifully written, the prose wonderful (the translator makes a difference -  W.S. Kuniczak is definitely my choice)

It's a love story set in the face of adversity in Nero's Rome just as Jesus Christ was making waves and forming Christianity. If you enjoyed Gladiator, then this book could be for you. The persecution of the Christians is quite graphic so be warned.  Historical fiction, winner of the nobel prize for literature , I couldn't put it down. The character Petronius is one of my all time favourites, (only just pipped to the post by my namesake Bjartur )

"Grand in scope and ambition, Quo Vadis explores the themes of love, desire and profound moral courage. Lavish descriptions, vivid dialogue and brilliantly drawn characters make this one of the world’s greatest epics. "

Agree. She was a major 20th century author. For anyone wanting to read about wizards, Le Guin is the author to go for.

Dave

Yes, The Dalai Lama's Cat is definitiely a delighful read.

Dave

That's a great piece of writing - and to think he wrote the original script as a POW which was destroyed by the Gestapo. I wonder if the original differed much from what he wrote subsequently?

No pop-shot, just a difference of opinion. 😊 I might be prejudiced coz reading Steinbeck at school always felt like a chore.

I can't think of a particular 'delightful' passage right now, but there have been some on this thread. The quote from Murray's Mountaineering in Scotland is one, and there's many more in that book. 

If we go with fantastic writing, as per your OP.....

I give you Darkness Visible by William Golding. The opening passage deals with a horrific event, but is probably the best piece of descriptive prose I've ever read.

Difficult to answer this. So many great things to read.

I'll suggest a passage from chapter 2 in Martin Chuzzlewit, where an evening wind uprose, and the following five paragraphs. When I first read the book many years ago, I went back and read that description several times, it was so well crafted 

I'm picking up a second-hand copy of his autobiography next week, and it will be interesting to see if he says anything about this.

The first ascent of Tower Ridge by WH Murray is my favourite….i can’t remember how many times I’ve read it but there is newness on every occasion…

The most beautifully written book for me has to be….

‘As I walked out one midsummer morning’ by Laurie Lee….I would implore anyone to read it…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez One hundred years of solitude

"Then he saw the leaves of the banana plants being lashed by the rain and he knew that he was not surrounded by ghosts, as he had feared, but that he was in the midst of a storm of tiny yellow flowers falling. He took a deep breath, the same breath he would have used to say his last words, and he died."

Calvino If on a winter night dear traveler

"Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings. Ludmilla lies with her head on your shoulder, her hand in your hand, as you hold the book open. Her breathing is regular, your breathing is regular. She reads in your pauses, you read in hers. A moment ago, the book was in your hands, now it is in hers, and you are both so absorbed in your reading that you do not notice that you have switched books. You read the last line, she reads the last."

Nabokov Pale Fire

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure of the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky"

I remember having the opening chapter of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie read to us in school and being astonished at what could be done with simile and metaphor. I've had a love of verbal fireworks ever since and used it a number of times myself to teach figurative language.

I did amateur proof-reading and editing for a mate's book about his adventures travelling through Spain. He'd been inspired by As I Walked Out...

What a stylist.

Yarrow ran to greet him, crying with joy. 

I think that's the last line? If so I've remembered it from 1974

Well your OP has stolen my favourite book (although other passages in there are amazing too).

So, how about "The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on.

Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls. The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose farther and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapors, busied themselves round his head. The body lifted a fraction of an inch from the sand and a bubble of air escaped from the mouth with a wet plop. Then it turned gently in the water. Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out toward the open sea."

Perhaps not strictly delightful, but amazing nonetheless

'Shadows of the Sun,' Ryzard Kaplinski, stands out for me.

I would bet many have been….I was myself having read it!

The year later I walked alone aged 18 from Seville to Cadiz, sleeping rough and living so cheaply. Spain in 1983 still felt remote away from the major towns and as he experienced, I also experienced the warmth and kindness of the people, the dust and the incredible strength of the sun….an amazing place!

For me, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is a beautiful read. When I read the opening paragraph I knew I was in for a treat and I wasn't wrong. I had to photograph it and send it to all my reading friends.

"The morning express bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed. The train's brief deception jolted its riders. The bulge of humans hanging out of the doorway distended perilously, like a soap bubble at its limits."

I've always thought this to be rather wonderful. It's a footnote in 'Life: a User's Manual' by Georges Perec.

Polonius is the 43rd descendant of a pair of tame hamsters which Rémi Rorschach gave Olivia as a present shortly after he met her: the two of them had seen an animal-trainer at a Stuttgart music hall and were so impressed by the athletic exploits of the hamster Ludovic - disporting himself with equal case on the rings, the bar, the trapeze, and the parallel bars - that they asked if they could buy him. The trainer, Lefèvre, refused, but sold them instead a pair - Gertrude and Sigismond -which he had trained to play dominoes. The tradition was maintained from generation to generation, with each set of parents spontaneously teaching their offspring to play. Unfortunately, the previous winter an epidemic had almost wiped out the little colony: the sole survivor, Polonius, could not play solo, and, worse, was condemned to waste away if he was prevented from indulging in his favourite pastime. Thus he had to be taken once a week to Meudon to his trainer, who, thoughnow retired, continued to raise little circus animals for his own amusement.

Yes. Can you travel to Nuristan June?

Surprised no-one has mentioned Tove Jansson. As well as writing the Moomin books (which I've not read) she wrote The Summer Book, an episodic and simply written tale of a young girl staying through summer on an island in the Baltic. Haven't read it for many years, but delight seems to be the abiding memory.

Also, bizarrely, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. It's a horror story of sorts, but written in such an immediate, lucid style that totally got into the heads of the young protagonists and was a real delight to read despite the very real sense of looming (but never quite specified) menace. A gem.