Personal Days: A Novel

by Ed Park (Goodreads author)

book data

435 ratings, 3.20 average rating, 156 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		11%
4		26%
3		37%
2		18%
1		5%

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published

May 13th 2008 by Random House Trade Paperbacks

binding

Paperback, 224 pages

literary awards

PEN Hemingway Award Finalist, John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize Finalist, TIME Magazine Top 10 Fiction Book of the Year

isbn

0812978579 (isbn13: 9780812978575)

description

In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turn...more

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A Day in the Life: Work Memoirs

63 books | 44 voters

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 924)

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06/15/08

Imogen rated it:

Read in June, 2008

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

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10/17/07

Ed rated it:

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: everyone!

The best book I ever wrote!

Like this review? yes (6 people liked it)

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12/10/08

David rated it:

bookshelves: disappointing, read-in-2008

Read in December, 2008

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 narrativ...more

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07/30/08

Bill rated it:

Read in August, 2008

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. N...more

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05/16/08

Meg rated it:

Read in December, 2008

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

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07/06/08

Chris "Stu" rated it:

bookshelves: 2008

Read in July, 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 co...more

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07/01/08

Rifftrafft rated it:

Read in July, 2008

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 comp...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)

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05/31/08

Jim rated it:

bookshelves: humor-and-irony, wage-slaves

Read in June, 2008

recommended to Jim by: Alex Heminsley
recommends it for: wage slaves

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-ti...more

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07/15/08

Aili rated it:

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Aili by: The New Yorker
recommends it for: Drunk Uncle Joe; anyone who has ever received an email about an imminent server reboot

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 i...more

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11/16/08

Alex rated it:

bookshelves: fiction, new-york-city

Read in December, 2008

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

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09/21/08

Jennifer rated it:

Read in September, 2008

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 fr...more

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12/14/08

Pete Sikora rated it:

Read in December, 2008

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.

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11/26/08

Alexander rated it:

Read in November, 2008

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."

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07/29/08

Felicity rated it:

Read in August, 2008

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 i...more

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08/30/08

Jasmine rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in August, 2008

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

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06/05/08

Rachel rated it:

Read in June, 2008

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 p...more

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11/25/08

Christopher rated it:

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 characte...more

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05/11/09

Alan rated it:

Read in May, 2009

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 fi...more

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08/16/08

Katherine rated it:

Read in August, 2008

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.

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12/18/08

Leslie rated it:

bookshelves: 2009

Read in January, 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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quotes from this book

"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 <i>around lunchtime</i>, the nonsensical <i>Thanks</i>, the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic." More quotes...