Thursday, December 11, 2008

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?

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Office Babylon

[I]t is the small tablets with tiny writing that are the most tantalising objects in Babylon, Myth and Reality (at the British Museum until 15 March). Can one, through them, get beyond archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys?

Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the equivalent of office files – letters, legal documents, contracts, mortgages, lists of goods – but there are also messages addressed to the gods, some of them expressing indignance that good behaviour has not been rewarded. —Peter Campbell, LRB

Monday, December 8, 2008

TIME to get "Personal"!

Personal Days joins books by Roberto Bolaño, Jhumpa Lahiri, Neil Gaiman, and others on Time magazine's list of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008!

Read the full article here, and buy copies of PD here.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

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!):

Saturday, December 6, 2008

129...with a bullet!

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