This book is insufferable. I struggled to get through the first 10% due to endless sentences and completely made-up words like "characterologically" and "phantasmatic". But here's the sentence that did me in:

"If there’s a Proustian madeleine of my Fortune 500 life that continues to pull me into the past, that evokes a corporate nostalgia and longing, neither of which qualifies as enjoyable but both of which are uncannily mesmerizing, it’s calling an 800 number."

DNF at 12%.

I appreciate NetGalley and the publisher for access to a digital ARC. My honest review is my own opinion.

In “Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke,” author and academic La Berge pens “a more manageable genre of a Marxist-inflected, queer, auto-theoretical work memoir.” I needed to capture that direct quote, as I knew my own language base would be inadequate to describe this volume. In other words, La Berge recounts her two year working for “the Conglomerate” and with the infamous Arthur Anderson accounting firm, providing quality assurance to the countless spreadsheets needed to document preventative steps taken for any end-of-the-world scenario that might occur in the face of the techno rapture that was the Y2K phenomenon. After all, according to the company, “Y2K is a documentation problem, not a technology problem.”

I didn’t think I would enjoy this book as much as I did. Having worked for a while with these corporate types who’ve “tasted the kool aid” and become drunk on company loyalty and the travel perks of frequent flyer miles and free hotel amenities, I could empathize with the useless Wednesday staff meetings, the Cindy-approved rotating agenda, and the corporate catch phrases of “at the end of the day” and “it is what it is.” I will admit to being a bit flummoxed with the some of the Marxist theories, so I might try reading the author’s [book:Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary|61161539] as a necessary primer.

My thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for this ARC. It was an enjoyable and edifying read.

I really liked the premise of this book and think there are some interesting insights tucked in here, but unfortunately it was a difficult book to get through. The writing felt all over the place because it was more stream of consciousness and less narrative, so it was hard to follow the relevance of various anecdotes or jumping through time. I think it was supposed to create an informal and intimate relationship with the reader, but it just lost me time and time again.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC and the opportunity to read and try this book.

This, unfortunately, went way too far over my head. While the premise was interesting, this felt very discombobulated and didn't provide a very fleshed out criticism of capitalism as promised. Many of the sentences rambled on to the point I forgot what they were trying to get across. Overall, this was a little bit of a disappointment for me.
That being said, I did find the story entertaining and enjoyed the author's dry sense of humor. I'd never read much about the Y2K tech dilemma so I did find that interesting. I think that readers who have worked in large companies or tech or advertising would probably relate to the sentiments quite a bit.

With wry humor, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her early foray into a capitalist career. She explicates corporate toil in the years leading up to anticlimactic Y2K and provides an insider view of a corrupt corporation that would crash and burn.

This is sort of an employment coming of age story told well after the fact. Straight out of college, where she studied philosophy, La Berge got a job she wanted. The job title bore about as much relationship to her job as Sanitary Engineer does to unclogging a toilet. Not only was the actual work boring, the project wasn’t what one might imagine. Even after a promotion with different responsibilites it all had the feeling of make work. She kept notes and after leaving she tried to write about it but it didn’t jell. So La Berge went on with her life, entered academia and eventually returned to the notes and wrote this book. It’s the narrative of her experience with this one job. It isn’t especially entertaining and her experience is hardly original although there are some anecdotes that cause eye-rolling, nodding and sarcastic smiles of recognition. To me the book’s real shortcoming is that the author fails to connect her experience to the wider realm of business as unmistakable universal primary attributes.

I really like this book because it is like diving into my musings from 4 years ago, when I was ready to retire and just do whatever I want. However, I was told I have 40-50 more years of this "fake work", so until then, I will try to destroy capitalism. Anyway, this book, paired with Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman, will have you really thinking about the meaning of work and actually contributing to society. I found Leigh Claire La Berge to be relatable in her experience and personal reflections, so that made this book an easy read.

This was a very good book. It was well-written. I would highly recommend it.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I had really high hopes for FAKE WORK. I was expecting a scathing, no-holds-barred critique of late-stage capitalism and how we as a society can see through the ensuing hellscape it has created. But that’s not what this is, despite the summaries making it seem like a reasonable expectation. This is definitely a (sometimes meandering) memoir set primarily in 1999 as the author reflects on her experiences in an intense corporate job and culture. And there are some vaguely critical, analytical musings on capitalism and its effects, but it turns out the title is more apt than I initially realized: we get a sense that the author is “beginning to suspect capitalism is a joke,” but we never really reach a fully fleshed-out argument.

I do think the author is on something, and that she provides some good reflections on her experiences in corporate America. And I think, given some different editing, this book could have had some teeth. The way it stands right now, though, it feels like it doesn’t necessarily accomplish what it set out or was marketed to do in a lot of ways. I kept waiting for the energy and passion of a takedown, but it never came. And let’s be honest, capitalism isn’t just a joke. It’s very real and has devastating consequences for most people in our society, save for a very few who benefit from it. We really need that takedown, but Leigh Claire La Barge’s FAKE WORK is not the book that gives it to us.

It was an enjoyable memoir, and, had my expectations been different, I might not feel so disappointed. It’s well written and clearly comes from a place of reflection for the author. I’m glad to have read it, and now I want to read the book I thought this was going to be!

Very helpful, but not as advertised. Would not recommend, 1/5 stars. ⭐️ But it was the only way for the two 2️⃣ star

I was intrigued by the title and cover. I thoroughly enjoyed Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter and was expecting something similar, especially with that tagline... Unfortunately, what I found felt more like someone's journal entries about their job and life in 1999. While I was there and similarly aged (I'm a year or two older), with somewhat similar experience (friends who worked at Andersen and in advertising), I still couldn't find my way into this one... It felt repetitive and like a primer on Y2K more than anything else.

I kept waiting for some snark or eye rollingly-bad behavior but kept finding lengthy expositions on what Y2K was supposed to be and what a flop it turned out to be. It couldn't hold my attention. Honestly, the prologue was the most interesting part - and felt like it gave me the whole story, in like 15 page flips (I read it on kindle). It had more of the tone I was expecting. The rest of the writing was surprisingly dry and felt more like a recitation of information with an occasional interjection of irritation than anything else.

This one wasn't for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the advanced reader copy.

I thought the premise of this book--that the author, who'd worked for a management consulting company that was trying to proactively prevent the negative predictions for Y2K, eventually understood her job to be fake work--sounded like a new take on the personal narrative/business book. Unfortunately, the book felt overwritten and bloated from the first page of the prologue. There were times when it was a slog to get through a sentence and remember what the purpose of the sentence was by the time I got to the end. This felt like a case of not having a thorough enough editor. Too bad.

In Fake Work, Leigh Claire La Berge tells the story of the two years she spent working on a bogus Y2K preparedness team. It was 1998 when she lucked into this plush gig with a global advertising conglomerate. Mind you, she wasn’t amending lines of code or doing anything else to avert a tech apocalypse. Rather, she worked as a quality assurance analyst, endlessly double-checking “the Conglomerate’s” documentation of their Y2K prep. All this documenting and quality assuring was aimed at defending against potential lawsuits should the new millennium interrupt advertising as usual. Working alongside Leigh Claire and her team were consultants from the now defunct Arthur Andersen, the management consulting firm that had sold the Conglomerate this goofy process. From the start, La Berge recognized something phony about the whole endeavor, so she started doing a little documenting of her own, writing about her experiences and the people she worked with. She collected her observations in what she called her Bildungsroman. However, it would only be with the benefit of hindsight, and a Ph.D. involving extensive grounding in Marxist theory, that she would come to see not only her Y2K work as fake, but all “work” done in the name of capitalism.

Fake Work is a fun nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers Y2K fears, and especially for those just starting their corporate work life around the turn of the millennium. I fall into that group, and La Berge’s descriptions of ridiculous training, corporate true believers, and meaningless, instantly forgotten work, really resonated with me. As a memoir, Fake Work is at its best when narrating do-nothing office days and profligate spending during global business travel. La Berge’s observations are sharp, and these concrete moments shine with her humor and cleverness. However, whenever La Berge steps away from describing actual events and starts running her experiences through the Marxist theory machine, the writing goes slack and starts to sag under the weight of its own theoretical heft. Luckily, these theory-dense passages tend to occur more in the first half of the book, so it picks up momentum as it goes along.

I love ‘90s nostalgia, and I’m grateful I got to be among the first to read this one-of-a-kind memoir. My thanks to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for providing me with a copy of Fake Work in exchange for my review.

I want to be clear: I went into this book expecting a sharp, satirical takedown of corporate absurdity and late-stage capitalism. What I got instead felt more like an overly long journal entry from 1999, packed with vague philosophical musings and very little bite.

📉 Why It Missed the Mark:
🛠️ Not a Takedown—More a Ramble – Despite the bold title and comparisons to Bullshit Jobs, this isn’t a critique of capitalism so much as a meandering, memoir-ish account of the author’s time in consulting. It reads more like a lightly annotated diary than an insightful analysis.
📚 Repetitive and Self-Indulgent – The term bildungsroman appears over 50 times (yes, I checked), and yet it never seems to earn its place in the narrative. There are references to personal development, but no clear arc or deeper takeaway that connects the concept to the reader.
💼 Boring Office Culture, But Not in a Fun Way – The absurdity of corporate life is acknowledged, but without the humor or sharpness you might expect. Instead of feeling exposed, the system feels... untouched.

🤷‍♀️ Final Take: This wasn’t so much a takedown of capitalism as it was a long, loosely political meditation with occasional flashes of insight. I don’t necessarily disagree with the politics, but the execution was flat and not nearly as engaging as the synopsis suggested.

Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La Berge, wasn't what I was hoping for but once I adjusted my expectations I enjoyed it.

When I mention adjusting expectations I am not talking about some hierarchical adjustment, no change in what I expect in writing quality. I am talking about what I thought the book was going to be. I expected more of an explicit critique of capitalism, almost academic in nature. Once I realized it was a memoir first and the critique was more by showing than explaining, I could enjoy the book much more. Those of us who have studied and taught such critiques will recognize where the theory is used even if it isn't explicitly stated and explained.

The memoir as such was a mix of funny and horrifying, knowing that what was happening 25 years ago is only more prevalent today puts an element of disgust in a humorous memoir.

The critique is here, and there are places where she explains some of the thinking behind her critique, but if you were wanting a book laying out arguments and coming to a worked-through conclusion, you could be disappointed.

I would recommend this to readers who are looking more for some examples, supported by rational thought, of how dysfunctional our system is. If you want a memoir without commentary on society, or a textbook on Marxist analysis of capitalism, you will need to adjust your expectations, as I did.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Really interesting account of the author's experience of corporate life. I think many people who have worked in similar corporate environments will recognise much of this!

Hmm.. memoirish, Y2K musings and lots on the world of work. At some points I enjoyed it and at others it felt like a bit of a rant. Not quite my cup of tea. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. This one went a bit too over my head in waxing romantic on early aughts corporate life.

There are some good, skewering observations here, but the author gets a little too wrapped up in the spiral of “The Process” and seems to repeat the same things over and over.

While some will likely appreciate the extreme lengths to philosophize on the non-essential toils of the Y2K prep endeavor, to me it just felt like putting fancy wallpaper on a sparse premise.

I was intrigued by the description and premise but I think the author's dry, rather dense sense of humor is not for me. This might be good for someone who is interested in an anthropological take on corporate America.

It took a while for me to get into this book. The first third felt very repetitive, but maybe that was the point? That said, the story itself is interesting and kind of a hilarious take on how insane our society functions, through the lens of the author's life during the Y2K crisis as a QA analyst.
I picked up this book because of the cover and was hoping it would have covered society as a whole instead of one story, but it was an interesting take on a time I have vivid memories of.