Whoa

The writing style is unconventional but works well. The last section, in particular, uses a literary technique that is incredibly innovative and interesting. I cannot tell you any more without being too much of a spoiler but at the end of the last section you will certainly think to yourself, “Whoa.”

—Sifter X

Go!

Novelist Alexander Chee on Personal Days: "Just go get it."

"It has the rhythm of a real office...The book is compact, its ideas are huge."
—Ass Backwords' "2008 Reading Roundup"

21st century box

Books That Feel Our Pain
Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End and Ed Park's Personal Days may be two of the short-list best novels ever written about work—imagine Catch-22, set in mid-sized 21st century offices—but they're more than that, they're finely observed and fully realized renderings of how young professionals live. —Common Sense Dancing

"Books of the Year"
I can't recommend it highly enough if you've had a terrible office job. Park use two different tricky POV's to construct a story full of delicious digressions that never lags for a second. The POV choices also capture the weird hazy timelessness of office life in a way I didn't totally think was possible. —Meg McCarron

And also this one...

According to The Book Bench (New Yorker blog), PD is PD is "2008’s Best Novel About Doing Battle with Microsoft Word and Losing"!

An eerily prescient tale of layoffs; think “Alien” set in an office, where computers are stealthily self-destructing and people keep disappearing from their cubicles, leaving vast empty warrens of corporate debris. Did I mention that it’s deeply, bitterly funny?

Coming to a book jacket near you

Hyphen lists PD as one of the "Other Dope Fiction Books by Asians."

iLost

Personal Days is a "tornado of increasing tragicomedic build-up that sucks you in and vomits you into a better place. Some killer one-liners in there. Tangentially lost my iPod because of this book."
—Yellow Redneck Blues

More!

One of the notable events in recent literary history was a modest bump in the number of novels about white-collar work. The two most heralded were, significantly, debuts: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End and Ed Park's Personal Days. Both young authors, possessed of little experience besides what their cubicle daydreaming and job insecurity had supplied, they exploited the potential of office spaces to their extreme, and the immediate response these novels elicited from reviewers was: "more!" We needed more novels about bagel brunches, useless meetings, excessive coffee drinking, awkward exchanges, e-mails and layoffs. We were to re-experience what so many of us went through every day, to know it as pain, to see the expression of that pain among others as a form of solidarity.

—Nikil Savil, for The Millions' "A Year in Reading"

Flexing that giddiness

Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits names Personal Days of the year's top 10 books! (Here's the Bat Segundo interview from earlier this year.)...

...Commonweal includes it in its Christmas Critics roundup—click here to see...

...and...a "former African dictator" gives it a thumbs-up:

Park shows both the cramped spaces and bizarrely profound social investments we make in our co-workers' lives by telling the stories of a dozen mid-level employees of a moribund company, marooned on an increasingly empty floor of a New York high rise. Together, they're bound in anxiety over losing their jobs, excitement at the sudden independence of being fired and terror of doing anything to draw attention to themselves. Oddly, this semi-oblivion engrosses them. The best jokes come from the office. So do the freshest ironic nightmares. It's the most entertaining thing they have, but no one wants to ask too seriously if perhaps that's because it's all they have. —Et Tu, Mr. Destructo?

Weatherless timelessness

This book, Personal Days, totally nails the particular weirdnesses of working in an office, how days blend into days, years blend into years. That weatherless timelessness. What a curious book to be reading this week, too, as the news is all so very dire -- recession, the publishing industry, joblessness, blah blah. Just like the people in the book, you can hate your job and still be so thankful for it. —Moonlight Ambulette

Bonus video (from 9 to 5!):

129...with a bullet!

At least it ranks higher than The Key to Metal Bumping: An Instructive Manual of Body and Fender Repair Practices.

The Written Nerd calls PD...

"Terrifyingly timely"!

PD clocks in at #5 on the Written Nerd's "Best-Loved Books of 2008."

That's a wrap

The L Magazine recommends Personal Days as a great holiday gift idea.

Everything is illuminated

From Moonlight Ambulette:

So now that I remembered how to read I've been picking up all the many half-read books littering my apartment, and have happily re-delved into Personal Days, Ed Park's very funny novel about a group of people who work in an office at a time of economic upheaval and rampant layoffs. It just goes to show you what a difference it makes to be reading the right book at the right time -- even just a few weeks ago I'm sure the employees' skittishness about layoffs wouldn't have struck so chillingly close to home, but now layoffs (and rumored magazine shut-downs) are sort of the theme of the day at the media company where I work.

And then the most amazing thing happened. One day I read this paragraph: "Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised joke, as it hits every floor: Making local stops." Funny, I thought, and so true about the unexpected bonds. But no one makes that elevator joke where I work, bub! I mean, no one really makes small talk or even looks each other in the elevators in my building.

And guess what happened the next day at work. Two security guards in the elevator, going up, with practically every floor's button illuminated. One turned to the other and before he even said it I knew what he was going to say. Making local stops.

This book must be magic!

Gift idea

Personal Days is one of Book Nerd's favorite books of 2008!