Shoplifting From American Apparel; Pages 1-34

Summary: The first thirty or so pages are the novel was quite interesting. The novella begins with the main character, Sam. Sam is a young male who loves to write and his a few books already published. He lives an interesting life. By that I mean his life is not quite like most characters that I’ve read in the past. For example, his best friend is Louis. He met Louis over the internet, and only saw him a couple of times in real life. Their both writers with books published, and they are both mentally disturbed (the mentally disturbed is my opinion). Their friendship would die if it wasn’t for gmail chat. And on gmail chat, they have the weirdest conversations. (I’m not going to speak much about their conversation because it’s really not appropriate for school). If that relationship was not weird enough, then there’s Sheila. Sheila, is his on-and-off girlfriend. What I mean by that is that the novella mentions them being together for some time, and then suddenly it refers to their friendship as ‘just friends’. I guess this happens because almost a whole year has passed in just the first thirty-four pages of the book, if not more.
Currently, the section I finished reading ended of with Sam going to jail for shoplifting from an American Apparel store. He was on his way to a book reading, but then he decided to look at some thing in American Apparel, and ended up walking away with a T-shirt. He got caught and was sent to jail. In jail, a few weird characters were mentioned. Especially a drunk white guy who did nothing but swear at everybody and cried pretty disturbing things, like: “I am going to have sex with your little sister so hard” (Lin 32).

Quotation: “Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen. He showered and put on clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry” (Lin 13).

Reaction:This quote technically has no major significance, but rather than it mentions that Sam has a Microsoft Word file for his poetry. I didn’t choose a quote from the book hoping to find a significance in the text, I picked this section of the book because it pretty much gives the reader a clear picture of how the book it set up to be. The sentences are quite short in the novella, which makes it a pretty easy read. The book is somewhat like a depressing book in my eyes because of the short sentences. I believe that as a reader, we should be reading this book as with a ‘sigh’, or something similar. Because during the book reading that I went to, Tao Lin read the first chapter without any emotion, and I understood the book quite well as he was reading it. To finish this off on a good note, it is told in 3rd person omniscient. The protagonist is Sam, and there isn’t a antagonist yet. As for the setting, the story began on a afternoon, sometime during November.