Last night I finished the book that the upstate bookstore owner recommended to me. She said people either love it or hate it and I can sort of see why. It’s really funny. But about 200 pages in, you start to wonder if there is a story or if it’s just funny one-liners. Luckily, there is a story and I thought the book was great, great great. It’s about a corporate office and the relationships with your co-workers and the drama/fun/etc that goes on.

There were so many funny things to quote that I stopped writing them down about 200 pages in and it’s still a lot. There are whole paragraphs quoted, so get ready. So, put on the spectacles and take a minute to enjoy what Joshua Ferris had to say in Then We Came to the End.

1. “Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never end because we would never die”.

2. “We thanked eachother. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenuous or ironic. We said thanks for getting this done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting, and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked eachother”.

3. “But at the present moment I’m afraid all I have is apartment 4H at Bell Harbor Manor, which is neither a harbor, nor a manor and contains NOT ONE SINGLE BELL!!”

4. “She dusted the way she did everything else, with great gusto and command. It was the first time I had ever been intimidated by someone else’s dusting”.

5. “The last thing you wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea of that part of the weekend that had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain commited to walk around us. It might not be too bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their powerbars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort”.

6. Perhaps the worlds best insult that one man said to his co-workers in this book: “May your clever tongues be ripped from their cushy red linings and left to dry on pikes under the native sun of a cannibal land”. Pretty harsh.

Erica, I have categorized this for your pleasure and I think you would like this book. It really was very funny.