I was very confused by the many seemingless identical and interchangeable characters in this story, but the ending is very rewarding as everything comes together. A very funny book. ( )

For the first third of this book, I had to keep reminding myself to NOT think about Then We Came to the End. But the comparisons kept coming. However, after a few hours, I let the other book slip away and enjoyed this novel's characters and especially how the mundane tasks of work life become obsessions of the characters, how their routines and boring excrutia are funny. Ed Park has a talented ear and an infectious sense of humor. There was some trouble, for me, with the structure of the three parts, but all in all, I enjoyed it enough to read to the end. ( )

This book I am going to finish it because I started it. The disjointed absurd climate reminds me of how I see the world but the plot is not a real must read. I would recommend skipping this book. It is horrible. ( )

I was on board with this book for the first two sections and probably would have given it 3 stars. The characters were quirky, and not unlike people I've worked with in cubicle-type jobs in the past. The plot could be funny, though perhaps a bit too cute for me to completely buy in. Then I got to the last sentence - which, by the way, is almost 50 pages long - and it all fell apart for me. About half way through that sentence I lost all interest and skimmed to the end. I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything. If this is what life is like in the corporate world, I'm sure glad that I work in academia! ( )

As a fan of Office Space and The Office (both British and US), I picked up this book thinking it was going to be along the same lines, with smart, modern office humor. However, I had a difficult time with this book.

This was not structured like your typical novel, and that bothered me. I found it difficult to read, and I slowly lost interest in the plot. The characters all seemed the same, with similar names, and no differentiating characteristics, so it was easy to lose track of who was who.

When I got to the last section of the book, I nearly threw the book down in disgust. Written as one long run-on sentence email, it was very difficult to read. Who wants to read nearly 50 pages of text with lousy punctuation and no paragraph breaks? Maybe I didn't get what the author was trying to do, but the entire time I was reading this section, I couldn't stop thinking about how much I hated it. ( )

I liked this book better than 'Then We Came to the End'; partially because it was shorter. I also thought that Ed Park had a funnier take on the whole situation in his imaginary office environment. He didn't have the illustrations or the type fonts that 'Handle Time' has and it wasn't nearly as funny; but he did include a picture of a post-it note and tried to change up the type fonts a little for effect. I liked this book. ( )

If you’ve had the “pleasure” of reading Joshua Ferris’ novel Then We Came to the End you can probably skip Ed Park’s Personal Days. The two books are so similar in tone and plot (right down to each book having a character writing a story about the office they work in) that you would think there would have been a lawsuit at some point.

Like Ferris’ novel, Park’s book also starts out in the first person plural point of view. The reader gets to know a group of office workers, “we”, who work for a failing company in New York City. As with a lot of companies that aren’t doing so well, there are layoffs and the air of impending doom pervades the place. We never know the company or the field they work in, making the distance between the readers and the characters that much greater. The problem with the first person plural point of view is that you never get close to any one character and therefore all the characters become some sort of amorphous blob. Park’s situation isn’t helped any by the fact that a majority of his characters have names that start with J — Jill, Jonah, Jenny, Jack . . . which makes it even harder to keep everyone straight.

http://www.iwilldare.com/2008/09/20/p...

Vignettes in office.

Clever, often quite funny.

Just a tad too cute.

If you've ever spent time working in a cubicle farm, then you know (and love) these characters! Parts 1 and 2 (of 3) are laugh-out-loud funny. I loved it. A quick read. ( )