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Jun 15, 2008

Imogen rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2007

Ed rated it:

The best book I ever wrote!

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2008

David rated it:

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...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 04, 2008

Bill rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 19, 2008

Meghan rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 08, 2008

Chris "Stu" rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 11, 2008

Rifftrafft rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 15, 2008

Jim rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 15, 2008

Aili rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 03, 2008

Alex rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 21, 2008

Jennifer rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 14, 2008

Pete rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 26, 2008

Alexander rated it:

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."

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 01, 2008

Felicity rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 30, 2008

Jasmine rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 05, 2008

Rachel rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 25, 2008

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 04, 2012

Christina Marie rated it:

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 More...

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Jul 24, 2009

Debbie (Readerbuzz) rated it:

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.

More...

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May 11, 2009

Alan rated it:

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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Aug 16, 2008

Katherine rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 07, 2011

Kris rated it:

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:

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:

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

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 12, 2009

Aaron rated it:

A spiritual successor to Microserfs. Read this book now.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 01, 2009

Angela rated it:

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, fr More...

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Jun 12, 2011

Beth rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 08, 2008

Nonakasparov rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 12, 2010

Evan rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 25, 2009

Elijah rated it:

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 "fi More...

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