Personal Days: A Novel

One of my favourite novels from my twenties was Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, a drama-comedy book about a group of friends who leave Microsoft to start their own games company. I’m always looking for books in the same vein, and recently I read Personal Days by Ed Park.

I enjoyed Personal Days, though maybe not as much as Microserfs. It’s a quick, fun read with an unexpected twist in the end. You can buy Personal Days from Fictionwise (ebook) or Amazon.

Here’s a review by Doug Rushkoff (writing for BoingBoing), which led me to Personal Days:

Personal Days, by Ed Park, is a post-Dilbert, post-Microserfs look at office culture. It’s like the show The Office, except populated by people who, for the most part, understand what is happening to them. What I like best about the book is Ed Park’s use of cliché phrases. You know how that first song on Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom album (Beyond Belief) strings together known phrases into something entirely bigger? Or the way Delmore Schwartz would italicize a phrase as if to show it was a saying instead of just words? Know what I’m saying? Park does this throughout his text, creating a gentle, phantom hypertext that required no further explanation. And this black comedy about downsizing brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office.

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