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Personal Days

by Ed Park (Goodreads Author)

3.17 of 5 stars 3.17 · rating details · 883 ratings · 235 reviews

In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers.

On a Sunday, one of them is called at home....more

Paperback, 256 pages

Published May 13th 2008 by Random House Trade Paperbacks (first published May 1st 2008)

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Jun 15, 2008 Imogen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My dog is running up to me, pressing a tennis ball into my leg, then running away from me. Over and over, and has been for the last hour or so, since seven AM, so forgive me if this ins't the lucidest review you've ever read. See I live in this long, basement/garage/bedroom, where there's room for a pretty humble game of fetch, and there's nothing that dog likes more than a humble game of fetch. She especially prefers fetch to, like, hanging out and not whining while I sleep, or sleeping too whi...more

3 likes · like · see review

Oct 20, 2007 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars · (Review from the author) Recommends it for: everyone!

The best book I ever wrote!

15 likes · like · see review

Dec 11, 2008 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2008, disappointing

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Ed Park, that his book came out roughly a year after Joshua Ferris's infinitely superior "Then We Came to the End". The similarities are staggering - the milieu and plot of both books are virtually identical -- a Chicago/Manhattan advertising/graphic design office, staffed by assorted twenty- and thirty-something professionals, dealing with successive rounds of layoffs and the resulting paranoia. Not only that, use of a 3rd person plural narrative voice an...more

6 likes · like · see review

Aug 04, 2008 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fairly quick read, and actually quite amusing. It's about a group of workers in an unnamed office in NYC. The basic plot concerns the ongoing rash of firings that have been going on. Several former workmates are already past-tense when the story opens. There is also a lot of discussion about how boring/annoying their jobs are, and what an idiot their boss ("the Sprout") is. I kept thinking of Michael from The Office throughout. I won't spoil the explanation of the nickname. Nicknames a...more

1 like · like · see review

Dec 19, 2008 Meghan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ed Park does something pretty laudable here, which is, he does a lot of things that should be failures and makes them not at all failures, at all. First he takes a subject that is easily hit with words as a side of a barn is with bullets. He strips the subject of a name and a purpose so as to create a dystopia of privilege. He divides his novel into three sections that all have a sort of gimmick. He creates an almost insanely twisting plot/ending. And he does so in a very small amount of space,...more

2 likes · like · see review

Jul 08, 2008 Chris "Stu" rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

So it seems weird to wind up reading two books in a month that are both set in offices told in the first person plural. It seems obvious, after the fact, and it also seems like something that just developed independently of each other. _Personal Days_ winds up being more concerned with resolving all the plot threads than _And Then We Came To The End_, which is both good and bad. I think it's definitely worth reading, though.

As a side note, a lot of the reviews I read for this book complained abo...more

1 like · like · see review

Jul 11, 2008 Rifftrafft rated it 3 of 5 stars

bob wrote the best review of this book, you can read it here.

as you can imagine, i have extreme biases, so i'll keep this one short. this book is about working in an office. it is really great, really funny. i feel for ed that ferris got the jump on him, because the ferris book is just garbage next to this. almost every other line in _personal days_ is a joke, and most times that joke is really really hilarious. there's none of the mcsweeneys-esque cutesiness i was worried would comprise the ton...more bob wrote the best review of this book, you can read it here.

as you can imagine, i have extreme biases, so i'll keep this one short. this book is about working in an office. it is really great, really funny. i feel for ed that ferris got the jump on him, because the ferris book is just garbage next to this. almost every other line in _personal days_ is a joke, and most times that joke is really really hilarious. there's none of the mcsweeneys-esque cutesiness i was worried would comprise the tone, given the guy's background and nyghostly love of exclamation points. rather the sentences are extremely lean and mean and really *pop*. i haven't encountered that many books that have been able to maintain this level of comedy for hundreds of pages.

there's not much character development, but that's clearly a choice. he needs these characters not for who they are but what they do. the sections are really short, often only about 200-250 words long, which gives the book this bloggy feeling, performative insofar as you get the feeling that this very book could have been written on the job, as a lot of the characters in _personal days_ seem to be doing with their large swaths of idle time. the plot you know from the start. it's the only real tragic/comedic plot movement that can happen in an office: people get fired. i'm also just elated there were no interludes about female bosses with cancer, if you get my drift.

as far as office lit goes, and the times wondering aloud why there aren't more books like ed's: well, look. i think _the office_ got it right, insofar as _the office_ is an episodic television show written by some really top notch dudes. i have extreme biases. the office and the cubicle are intentionally designed to keep book-length plots to a minimum. aside from window dressing (e.g. an office book...but it's a doctors office! an office book...but it's the corporate offices *at* office max!), i'm fine with white-collar america not cannibalizing their day job experiences, and instead realizing what bob pointed out in his review:

Mr. Park’s deep-down belief that white-collar laborers needn’t lead alienated lives.

_the office_ is likely always going to be a better show about offices than any book you can write about the crazy things you've seen at d.e. shaw. look! you have lots of free time! why not write about something else? so my hope is that this book doesn't trigger a bunch of copycat follow-ups, but sparks some kind of new office consciousness (we'll call it that) that understands the fact that: as middle-class americans, we'll probably have to work for big corporations, in offices, and those offices will be really inefficient, and we'll likely be smarter than our bosses. we likely won't be able to "do what makes us happy for a living," as was the ridiculous future we were sold years ago. instead we'll need to go to the office, and we'll work really hard for three or four hours on what the man needs done, and then we'll get lunch, and then for two hours, two whole hours!, we can all work on our plays, or novels, or nasty internet memes, or lyrics for a song, or cooking recipes, or whatever it is. we'll look at the cubicle not as a prison but as a place where, in at least three directions, nobody will have any idea what we're up to.(less)

1 like · like · see review

Jun 15, 2008 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: wage slaves

Recommended to Jim by: Alex Heminsley

Shelves: humorous, fiction

Ed Park's book is kind of like The Office meets Kafka. Set in an unnamed company in Manhattan, recently taken over by another company run by faceless Californians, it is a collection of loosely connected anecdotes and observations that captures the absurdity, paranoia, and angst of white-collar wage slavery. Just as we impose meaning on life in hindsight, the plot of this book emerges as it goes along.

The Californians are exerting control and the Firings have begun. There are free-time sucking a...more

1 like · like · see review

Jul 15, 2008 Aili rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Drunk Uncle Joe; anyone who has ever received an email about an imminent server reboot

Recommended to Aili by: The New Yorker

For the record, I am giving this book 5 stars even though I'm pretty mad at it right now... for ending. It was a pretty quick read. I would say perfect for that business trip you're about to go on, but if you get to go on paid business trips you are perhaps not quite in the target audience.

I am a little annoyed that the plot crept up on me -- I was expecting events so mundane they would seem dark/depressing (I've heard And Then We Came to the End is like this, though I haven't read it) -- not ac...more

2 likes · like · see review

Dec 03, 2008 Alex rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: new-york-city, fiction

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...more

1 like · like · see review

Sep 21, 2008 Jennifer Busch rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book touched home-base like no other. Short snippets of office life put together just like a real office. In MY old office, things flowed much the way they do in this book; every event was separated by needing to do 30 other things before we could return to the first event. Office gossip was always drawn out because we had to - gasp - work! between breaks.

The three separate styles of writing did a great job of illustrating the deterioration of the company. The book goes from nicely groups...more

1 like · like · see review

Dec 14, 2008 Pete Sikora rated it 5 of 5 stars

Funniest book I've read since the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - and I was like 10 years old. An LOLfest.

People in my bookgroup say its a decent portratyal of the corporate world. Really dead on for some people for their office. Which makes me happy. Very cheering.

Plus there are a bunch of individually hilarious stories and plot twists. Who's got the screen play rights? I'd recommend this to anyone.

1 like · like · see review

Nov 26, 2008 Alexander rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the best new novels I've read in years. I feel like none of the reviews I've read of it quite describe what it feels like to read it---yes, it's funny, and the word "savage" appears a fair amount, but it's more like, "Oh, someone has finally described what it is like to work now."

1 like · like · see review

Aug 01, 2008 Felicity rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ok, when I first started reading this, I thought that it was the same as Joshua Ferris's book "Then We Came to The End" except that Joshua Ferris's story was better. Both are set in the modern work-place: lay-off fever has gripped the office and both are about the trivial details with which we become obsessed in our daily work days. But in the end, I think it's a dead heat: both books are very funny. Ed Harris's novel definitely improves with reading. By the last section--written in a kind of st...more

1 like · like · see review

Aug 30, 2008 Jasmine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

I really liked this book on some level it seemed to be more about hanging around than actually about following too much of the story line although of course there was one. The Storyline while it didn't garner a lot of my attention throughout the book had an ending that surprised me which doesn't happen a lot. The narration of the book I also found extremely interesting since it is narrated from a first person that doesn't figure as a character in the book. Almost like Nick in the Great Gatsby if...more

1 like · like · see review

Jun 05, 2008 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Oh, hilariously rendered workplace paranoia! You make my actual workplace so much more palatable. Being reminded to keep the paragraph markers on in a word processing program by a supervisor who signs correspondence "thanks muchly"--what is that in comparison to being emailed a boss's to do list to print out or, the more vast more diabolical plot that is actually taking place.
Also, fake inspirational quotes on getting ahead are excellent. I would like a calendar full of them to put next to my co...more

1 like · like · see review

Nov 25, 2008 Christopher rated it 2 of 5 stars

The office and its workers seems to be the preeminent vehicle for any American writer in the first decade of the 21st century - or more rather, the stultifying, soul-destorying mediocrity to which most people submit their waking lives, that is modern work. And so this tale of office workers operating in a faceless corporation with mundane jobs is a familiar construct.

And I guess because this is familiar ground, Ed Park loses marks. He spices up the non-plot with some smart characterisation - we...more

1 like · like · see review

Jan 04, 2012 Christina Marie Rau rated it 4 of 5 stars

Much had been made of the Ed Park novel, Personal Days, because it came out right after Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End, and they both use the first person plural for narration and they are both about office jobs and they both entail office politics of firing and fear. Fortunately, they are both fantastic in their own ways.

Park falls away from the "we" narration after the first of three parts of the novel. The second part reads like a manual with section labels like 2.b.ii, and the third...more Much had been made of the Ed Park novel, Personal Days, because it came out right after Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End, and they both use the first person plural for narration and they are both about office jobs and they both entail office politics of firing and fear. Fortunately, they are both fantastic in their own ways.

Park falls away from the "we" narration after the first of three parts of the novel. The second part reads like a manual with section labels like 2.b.ii, and the third is a long email with interesting punctuation written on a laptop that has no working period key.

I once had a laptop at my old job. It was heavy. Only the 1 key worked. I sat at a meeting with only that key working and managed to get to Blogger and read through the blogs of the day to keep myself entertained. Moral of the story: you don't need a working keyboard to use a laptop.

Park presents characters plagued by paranoia and stress. He focuses on the relationships co-workers make and then try to either maintain or ignore once one of them leaves the office, not just because of firing, but also because they simply move from one floor to another. Park demonstrates the necessity of absurd nicknames (Sprout, Crease, HABAW) and the ever-present annoyance of workplace metaphors (the best one being one that compares the office to a cruise ship for which you can be captain or passenger, and Pru says, "I think I'm the person barfing over the rail" -- HIL. AIR. EEE. US!). Park reminds us of the revolving door of IT specialists and never-working computers that are a staple of the workplace.

The most interesting twist of Park's novel is that it comments on the world outside of the workplace by magnifying office paranoia and insanity and allowing characters to be gullible because of those factors. He slips in a proverbial shroom and allows the last section to knock you off your balance beam. Evidence that this book affected me: reread that last sentence. What the hell is a proverbial shroom? Why would anyone be reading this on a balance beam, literally or figuratively? And that's evidence that Park's Personal Days is one great read that sticks with you even when you don't realize it. That's the mark of good stuff. (less)

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Jul 24, 2009 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it 4 of 5 stars

I kept thinking, Is the author of Then We Came to the End suing Park? Personal Days, like TWCE, is told in plural first person. Personal Days, like TWCE, takes place in an office. Personal Days, like TWCE, is inhabited by characters who have no grounding in reality, who are deeply neurotic, sometimes psychotic. Personal Days, like TWCE, consists of the slow and mysterious departure of staff and the gradual dissolution of the company. Personal Days, like TWCE, is both funny and sad.

The similarit...more

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May 11, 2009 Alan rated it 2 of 5 stars

This novel about the alienation and pointlessness of office life which satirizes the existence of the corporate drone invites comparison with "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris which explores the same territory. The Ferris novel is far superior.
Park's book is occasionally mildly amusing but the characters never come to life, as they do in the Ferris book. They are all just interchangeable names. He has a couple of sharp observations to make about the way office drones fill their days bu...more

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Aug 16, 2008 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book as much for its with and cleverness as I did for anything else. At the end of the day, it's not brilliantly written or incredibly exciting, but it's dead on as a portrait of the workplace, and the vague outlines of the characters, the fire about "the firings," the obsession with minor items and ideas at the office, are all brilliant- and fun - and the writer does an outstanding job making you feel in on the joke even as the book strikes a nerve. Well worth it.

1 like · like · see review

Nov 07, 2011 Kris rated it 2 of 5 stars

I enjoyed parts of this book, but there was a MAJOR issue I had with it. The book is divided into three parts: the first part reads like a regular story, written in 1st person plural - we did this, we saw that, etc.; the second part is written entirely in outline form - I.A.ii.b., etc. - a little annoying, but still fairly easy to follow; but the third part is written as one long, stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence. The premise (to the third part)is that a character is sending an email to a...more

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Sep 05, 2011 Jennifer rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-book

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. [return][return]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...more

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Jan 03, 2009 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

Loved it! For anyone who has ever worked in an office that has gone through a restructuring - this is not to be missed.

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May 12, 2009 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars

A spiritual successor to Microserfs. Read this book now.

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Jun 01, 2009 Angela rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have to be honest...I was a little disappointed with this book. I love stories of the holes of contemporary pain and alienation that we call "offices," but this one was another in this cookie-cutter parade of pseudo-ironic, "Office Space" wannabes like "Then We Came To The End" or "Company." Though I think "Company" is so far the best of all of these wry, dry-witted office stories, they all suffer from a kind of self-satisfied smugness that, frankly, reminds me of just why I don't want to be c...more

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Jun 20, 2008 Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Hilarious - if you work in a cube-farm you will very much relate to this. The end is a little convoluted and not as funny, but it's a quick read. I read a review of this comparing it to a modern Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener - needless to say, because it's modern, it's a much easier read. Plus, it has the humor that Melville certainly isn't known for. Short book - novella really.

1 like · like · see review

Jul 08, 2008 Nonakasparov rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Office workers. NYers with jobs

Shelves: novels

Anyone who has worked or attempted to work, or wondered what work was... Anyone who has cut-and-pasted and has reflected upon doing so... Employees in cubicles with computers... Anyone who has been moved or removed by a force beyond one's own control... Anyone maintaining cognitive functions not solely devoted to tools menu commands... read this book.

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Jan 12, 2010 Evan rated it 5 of 5 stars

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....more

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Jun 25, 2009 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 5 of 5 stars

First, a disclaimer: I know Ed Park, and I use him as a personal reference when I'm job-hunting, so I may be a bit biased. On the other hand he was my professor, and therefore has graded my own writing, so I really shouldn't have to pull punches.

But, I really didn't find any punches to pull anyway, because I loved Personal Days (dunno if there was bias involved), and I've never even worked in a normal office. At times, the book does feel a bit like an author's quintessential "first book" in that...more First, a disclaimer: I know Ed Park, and I use him as a personal reference when I'm job-hunting, so I may be a bit biased. On the other hand he was my professor, and therefore has graded my own writing, so I really shouldn't have to pull punches.

But, I really didn't find any punches to pull anyway, because I loved Personal Days (dunno if there was bias involved), and I've never even worked in a normal office. At times, the book does feel a bit like an author's quintessential "first book" in that it is constantly experimenting and doing things differently (each third of the book is extremely different from the other two) but it pretty much always works.

The first section of the book, all in first person plural of all things, is basically a series of humorous vignettes, without any real sense of a plot other than a general sense of foreboding. It's very funny, perfectly encapsulates New York (the Good Starbucks and the Bad Starbucks, for example), and is easy to read in small doses. That first section kind of flies by without feeling like a lot has gotten done, but it's very enjoyable. The second section is the most conventional (although the chapters are structured like an outline), and it's here that one realizes how the short bits in the first part really established the characters, and a plot starts to develop, if seemingly lazily. Then it's in the third section (the rambling section written in first person, as one paragraph, without periods, for spoilery reasons) that it suddenly becomes clear that there was a plot all along, and we suddenly realize that we were reading a mystery.

That last section should probably be read in one sitting, if possible, and while I was skeptical at its start, it sucked me in very quickly. (Stream of consciousness works wonderfully when it's funny.) It's a great reveal that makes one realize, just in the third act, that they were reading a well-scripted mystery.

I'm sure that those who've led normal lives of office drudgery (as opposed to my work-at-home drudgery, which might be worse) will appreciate Personal Days even more than I did.(less)

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About Ed Park

I'm the author of the novel PERSONAL DAYS and a founding editor of THE BELIEVER.

More about Ed Park...

Books by Ed Park

Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from the Believer

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Quotes from Personal Days

“A few insect skeletons lay scattered on the narrow sill, shiny and precise and sad as broken jewelry.” — 11 people liked it

“Maxine will sometimes compliment us on our hair or other aspects of our scruffy appearance. The next day, or even later the same day, she'll send an all-caps e-mail asking why a certain form is not on her desk. This will prompt a peppy reply, one barely stifling a howl of fear:

Hey Maxine!
The document you want was actually put in your in-box yesterday around lunchtime. I also e-mailed it to you and Russell. Let me know if you can't find it!
Thanks!
Laars

P.S. I'm also attaching it again as a Word doc, just in case.

There's so much wrong here: the fake-vague around lunchtime, the nonsensical Thanks, the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic.” — 3 people liked it

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