We know many of our faithful readers get their daily pinch some time in the middle of the day while they're taking five personal minutes at their desks somewhere in the Warehouse district. If you find yourself happysad crazyserene within the cubicle farm of the modern-day office, may we suggest a wonderful book for your summer reading?
Not like you want to bring the office to the beach; it's a truism that you don't want your movies, art, and books to look too much like real life--real life is half boring and half maddening. But Joshua Ferris' first novel, And Then We Came to the End, is what Office Space would have been like if John Cheever had written it.
It's a breezy, readable, and highly humane novel with some ingenious literary devices built into it. Hard to believe a story about office life in an advertising agency written almost entirely in the second-person plural can be this compelling, but it really is. Now get back to work!
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/features/twctte/twctte_022307/index.html
