Personal Days

Good try. Doomed to be overshadowed by Ferris' Then We Came to the End, a similar tale of cubicle-and-layoff angst also told in the first person plural that got there a year earlier and adds up to more. Park's novel has more details and more jokes, but even thinner character development. Having worked at an internet ad agency during the economic crunch from 2000-2002 and seen the surreal half-empty workspaces and abandoned floors and disappearing co-workers that Park dramatizes I understand his point about the flatness and inauthenticity of that worklife--but that doesn't mean he couldn't create characters that are genuinely distinguishable and interesting.

This is a fast-moving book that also requires patience. It DOES all come together in part 3 -- not because the first two sections are faulty, but because the reality of one of the characters ends up making a great statement about the world that the other characters drift through in parts 1 & 2. Ed Park has a great sense of control over his narrative, especially considering how easy it would be to jump all over the place infinitely, there is a clear movement from character to character here. Are all the anecdotes elaborate? no -- but I felt like even the little, seemingly innocuous anecdotes ended up contributing to the overall themes and characters.

Not sure everyone would love this or find it funny (I spent time in a company eerily show more similar, so lots seemed familiar), but I thought this was well done and look forward to his future work! show less

Richard Ellmann in his seminal biography, illustrates how Joyce would perambulate, gleaning phrases and word salads from the hum of the city. Consigning such to scraps of paper in his pocket which he would then masterfully weave into the epic which was Ulysses. The first three quarters of Personal days reveal Ed Park simply aligning the scraps into perforated guide to office life.

I was prepared to hate this book. It was simply stat padding on my yearly totals.

The final quarter of the novel is a reaping, a summoning of poetry from the boredom of the modern workplace. The dross of half-truths is burned away and the reader remains all the richer .

I can still only offer three stars, though a fourth beckons wordlessly offstage.

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.

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? show more 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. show less

A hilarious look at dysfunctional office life in New York. Park's deadpan humor and the dry delivery of the mythical and fantastical in the office makes for a light, entertaining read. I laughed out loud in a bunch of places.

Someone actually went to Hamilton?! No way! [Another thing about Colgate and Hamilton is that Colgate is located in Hamilton, NY, and Hamilton is, well, not, which endlessly confuses Colgate parents who end up in Hamilton several times a year, looking for their Colgate-attending offspring...]

Recommended for those who like book clubs, inter-office mail, staplers, voice-to-text software, conspiracy theories, and Brooklyn.

-->Do you really want to quit?