Personal Days by Ed Park

Personal Days by Ed Park

I checked Personal Days out on a whim. I happened across it while browsing the library's available ebooks. It sounded Office Space-like, it had good reviews blurbs, and I liked the cover.

Let me start off my admitting that I did not finish Personal Days. I gave up around page 145 when I realized that all of Part III (pages 141-182) took the form of one email, one one-paragraph email, one one-paragraph drunken email. The idea of having to read those last 40 unformatted stream-of-consciousness pages on my Nook was simply too much for me and I threw in the towel.  I hadn't connected with any of the characters--in a sense they were as much strangers with me as they were to each other--so I felt no compunction about giving up on Personal Days.

That being said, Personal Days is indeed hilarious as advertised (it had its moments). The narrative style changes throughout the course of the novel though  it is quite choppy in general.  I'm sure the choppiness is  intentional and meant to play up the anxiety the characters feel in the workplace.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office environment can likely relate to what the characters in Personal Days think, feel, and experience (more so those who have worked in an unhealthy workplace). I would not recommend Personal Days to anyone working at an organization where layoffs are feared if not imminent as it will likely hit a little too close to home.