Although I just started it, I don't like the style and I don't find any valuable content...I'll keep reading it but just "randomly", as I don't think it's worth the time. ( )

Uncomfortable reading in these economic times, this novel--by turns a comic and a tragic representation of life at a rapidly dissolving advertising agency--paints a familiar picture of life in all kinds of offices. I liked it for the humanness of its portrayal of people often seen as cogs in the corporate machine. ( )

Added because of this excerpt posted at the GB Book Club blog."We didn't know who was responsible for putting the sushi roll behind Joe Pope's bookshelf. The first couple of days Joe had no clue about the sushi. Then he started taking furtive sniffs at his pits, and holding the wall of his palm to his mouth to get blowback from his breath. By the end of the week, he was certain it wasn't him.We smelled it, too. Persistent, high in the nostrils, it became worse than a dying animal. Joe's gorge rose every time he entered his office. The following week the smell was so atrocious the building people got involved, hunting the office for what turned out to be a sunshine roll- tuna, whitefish, salmon, and sprouts. Mike Boroshansky, the chief of security, kept bringing his tie up to his nose, as if he were a real cop at the scene of a murder." ( )

I loved the style of this book, and the rambling, unstructured feel to all of the dialogue, but it left me a little flat. Usually I like snapshot settings, where there’s no back story and you’re just dumped into a narrative (a la Catcher In The Rye), but this book was a bit lacking in anything at all. It was funny, don’t get me wrong, but not as good as I thought it would be. ( )

I've never watched either version of The Office. I have worked a generic cubicle job during a downsizing. I bought this before most of the reviews came out. Put all that together, and I was very satisfied with the book.

I found the characters and their antics perfectly credible. They were a bit more extreme than in my own workplace, but still in the same family, and you (I) want a novel to be an enhanced (over-saturated?) version of real life anyway.

The first person plural worked well; it was like someone coming home and telling you about their day. Of course, it's when most people don't have anyone at home that their work and personal lives can mesh so unhealthily. Again, familiar and realistic.

I certainly wouldn't want to work with those people. I wouldn't want to work in the corporate environment again in general. And maybe that helped me enjoy it -- knowing I'd recently escaped that world. ( )

Not funny. Why do book reviewers think anything featuring office cubicles must be humorous? ( )

This is probably the first book I’ve ever read that uses the first-person plural voice, and it works, primarily because of the last line, but also because of the theme. This is a story about a shared experience: working in an office at a pointless job in modern America. Most of us can relate. There are several parts in the book that are laugh-out-loud funny. The main thing that I think mars the novel and keeps it from being really good is an overlong middle passage, regarding the boss’s battle with cancer, in which point of view is broken. Also, the wrap-up ending-aside from the great last line-is a little too neat and obvious. Overall, this is a moderately fun read that I wish had lived up to my expectations a little better.This is probably the first book I’ve ever read that uses the first-person plural voice, and it works, primarily because of the last line, but also because of the theme. This is a story about a shared experience: working in an office at a pointless job in modern America. Most of us can relate. There are several parts in the book that are laugh-out-loud funny. The main thing that I think mars the novel and keeps it from being really good is an overlong middle passage, regarding the boss’s battle with cancer, in which point of view is broken. Also, the wrap-up ending-aside from the great last line-is a little too neat and obvious. Overall, this is a moderately fun read that I wish had lived up to my expectations a little better. ( )

Not really a review, but a book that starts like this....

"We were fractious an overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who
smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen."

is a pretty good way to start a book, unless your personal view of modern life is
considerably more rosy than mine. ( )

I kept thinking about the tv program The Office while I was reading this daffy portrayal of office workers, with their secret loves and ghastly secrets. Really enjoyed its hilarity and heart. ( )

The book has moments of humor. All of the character were one dimensional which represents what a person would see in a work environment. However if you never worked in an office environment most of the humor will be lost on you. ( )

There are different kinds of superficiality. When a book is said to be “relentlessly superficial,” it may be that it keeps promising depths that it does not deliver. This book is more “dependably superficial,” because we are told, by the book's style and voice, that it will not be plumbing any depths. A reader knows what kind of entertainment it offers.

At the same time this is not entirely fluff, because it has a very curious and original narrative voice: the narrator speaks using the first-person plural, representing himself as a group of office workers. “We gathered around Joe’s desk, waiting to hear what he would say”--that kind of locution structures the entire book, producing an interesting ambiguity. On the one hand, in most cases the “we” is an indeterminate number of office co-workers, so it is seldom entirely clear how many people are in the room in any given scene. On the other hand, there are times when “we” means the single narrator, who is not named, together with other people who think along the same lines and share the same gossip, so that the number of people in the room might be clear, but the number of people who know what happened in the room is unclear.

The vacillation between the experience of just one person and the collective office clique is consistently slightly unstable, and that, for me, produces the book’s only interest. There is one moment early on in the book when someone asks the narrator, “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” And it becomes suddenly clear that it is just the narrator, who has instigated an office intrigue under cover of the first-person plural. At that point the book could have dived into difficult issues of identity, as in “Atmospheric Disturbances” and many other such novels going back to Robbe-Grillet; but Joshua Ferris isn’t interested in those possibilities as much as he is interested in comedy that bobs just beneath the surface, never going too deep and never completely surfacing. ( )

Very funny and entertaining read about office life. I enjoyed this , but I think its not everybody's cup of tea ( )

Given my enjoyment of ad agency settings (Mad Men, Murder Must Advertise etc) as well as cube-lit, this should be a winner.

I did enjoy it: the petty workplace habits are well-observed and there was a rather neat device for the ‘lit’ part of the ‘cube-lit’ tag. The novel is told in first person plural (’we’*), which serves to make the reader complicit in the vile gang of characters’ activities.

Full review at the ( )

This is one of those novels that, after you've read it, you'll wish you were reading again for the first time. The whole experience with the characters is joyful, even when you're touched and teary-eyed. ( )

I couldn't put down the first half of the book, right up until the conversation entered Lynn Mason's head. Once the narrative switched from the "we" to the "I," it became far less interesting. Even when it switched back to the underlings, it was as if a thread had been pulled and the storyline unraveled. The characters had become unlikeable and, worse, boring by repetition. By the denouement, I was scarcely interested in a single character and finished solely on willpower.

I'd love to have given this book 2.5 stars--averaging the top marks for the first half and bottom marks for the second half. But since I must use whole stars, I generously rounded up. ( )

I wanted to love this book. I was totally rooting for this book. But I ended up abandining it on the El when I was half-way through reading it because it was kind of depressing. And not in an "all-my-relatives-died-in-a-plane-crash" way. In a whiny way. ( )

Unlike a lot of members here, I loved this book. It's been compared to Catch-22 and the Office before, and I think those are very apt descriptions. Funny, but quietly so, and real. ( )

This book is hilarious. I was literally laughing out loud while reading it. ( )

In fairness, this book is more of a 2 1/2 star, but given the tyrannical nature of the star system I am forced to go with a 2. Typically, this is the type of book I like--sarcastic, cynical, and funny. I really enjoyed the first half of it, but then got bogged down by the halfway point. I've worked in an office scenario like this before and easily recognized the stereotypes depicted by Ferris (part of the fun in the beginning was recognizing and assigning real life names to the characters, "Oh my God, that is totally Bubba!"--obviously names have been changed here to make sure I don't get my butt kicked by a former colleague). Part of the problem is that Ferris is so good at describing the minutiae of day-to-day life in an office--the petty bickering, the fight for the best office supplies, the gossiping that takes precedence over work--that I eventually began to feel like I was going to work every time I picked up the book.

This is not a bad book and it certainly has its merits. Ferris uses a peculiar point of view throughout the book that I have heard others complain about, but I found it was actually one of the strong points. The book is told from the "we" perspective, as though such is the mediocrity of their carbon copy lives that the mindless office drones can no longer think for themselves and instead think as a collective. As the book goes on, we begin to see individual characters emerge--usually as they are laid off from their jobs and, thus, their individuality is returned to them. In some cases, the individual character is someone who has become the poster child for a particular office stereotype and is granted an individual name based upon the collective's view of this person as "different" in some way: the person who is always last to know, the person who is always the first to know, the storyteller, the noncomformist, the perfectionist, the couple engaged in the interoffice affair. Also compelling is the stand alone chapter we get from the perspective of Lynn, the boss who is diagnosed with breast cancer and who struggles with keeping her private life and fears separate from the office.

As a whole, this was a clever conceit that would have done well as a novella, but it was wearing pretty thin by the 385 page mark. Watch Office Space--it does it better. ( )

A quirky book, this one had its moments of greatness & moments of just so-so writing. The narrator remains nameless, and yet a part of the action throughout. I was fine with that part. But the flow of the book left me a little miffed & it felt disjointed to me. It was a mix of comedy & seriousness, but I didn't particularly think they melded together quite right. The comedic parts were very "Seinfeld-esque", which I loved. I especially loved an early episode about a bookcase & a desk chair, & I wish there had been more of that. So I'm not quite sure how I felt about this one overall. I think I would've enjoyed it more had Joshua Ferris chosen a style of writing & stuck with it. ( )

A good book for those times when the day to day pointlessness of the work week is getting you down. This book is much, much funnier if you’ve actually spent time working in an office, in which case there are moments that will seem like Ferris must have actually had your job. The first-person plural is an interesting choice, and one he pulls off well, for the most part, although the small third person interlude in the middle was a welcome change. A bit drawn out at times, but overall a captivating read. ( )

Sigh. This is a book that probably started out as a bang-up short story. And in small doses, it's a pretty good voice-driven piece. Early on, the narrative perspective (told in the voice of "we thought this, we felt that, this annoyed us, we responded this way") wore thin. Very thin.

We stood around and shot the shit a lot, and we gossiped a lot, and we wasted time a lot, and surprisingly, we didn't like that people were getting canned a lot. But we didn't bother working a lot when the chance came to earn the right to be there--or when the chance came to save our skin. And when we moved on to other companies, we looked backed fondly and thought about our salad days. Ahhhh.

But what about the incongruous middle section? Where we become they and the narrative voice is now she--our boss? Yes, it's cleverly explained at the end, but if we stop reading the book, because it's annoying, and plodding, and we want to bash one another upon the head for standing around and gossiping instead of moving the PLOT along, for cripe's sake, well then, we never come to the end, and find out how clever the author is, do we?

Oh geeze. I know it's won all sorts of awards. And it's probably literature with capital L. But I couldn't wait to finish it, and that's not the sign of a great read for me. If I owned it, I'd give it to you in a heartbeat.

This one's a good library pick. Trust me. ( )

This story about the minutiae of office life is great, Despite having no discernable plot in terms of action, I loved the charaters and the anonymity of the narrator. It's well written, well crafted and strangely engrossing. Full of wit and pathos, I would definitley recommend this book to anyone looking for something a little different. ( )

I picked this up off of the "new book shelf" at the library in the hopes of finding something 'different' to read. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this journey out of my literary comfort zone. This book is quirky. Odd things happen & the drama is multi-layered. The point of view used seems unusual to me, but I don't read much general fiction so it may be a common device to speak of 'we' and 'us'. I did like the way it was used here to include the reader in the close-knit office environment. An unexpectedly satisfying read.