The Book of Qualities
J. Ruth Gendler treats abstract qualities as people. Anger has a job he is angry about and a knife in his pocket. Patience wears overalls and keeps a workshop in her basement. Across roughly seventy short prose poems, accompanied by Gendler's own pen-and-ink drawings, the book turns the internal weather of a life into a small, populated village. It is the kind of book readers keep on a bedside shelf and reopen at random. First published in 1988 and reissued by HarperPerennial, it has stayed quietly in print for decades. Brené Brown highlighted it in a 2013 blog roundup about courage.
What you might want to know about The Book of Qualities
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Short prose portraits in which inner qualities like Anger, Joy, Patience, and Excitement become characters with bodies, habits, and homes.
Yes. Brown featured the book in her 2013 'Books on the Blog: Being Brave' roundup, calling it magical and noting it was twenty-five years old at the time.
Prose poetry. Each piece reads like a short character sketch, two paragraphs to a page, in plain language.
The Book of Qualities was written by J. Ruth Gendler, published in 1988 by HarperPerennial.
The Book of Qualities is 100 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Book of Qualities takes most readers about 2 hours to finish.
The Book of Qualities is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
