Reading Response 10/20

To me the book Shoplifting from American Apparel. by Tao Lin was a straight forward, unconventional, and funny story. I enjoyed the novel because it was an easy and short read. The story of this novel is different from other stories I’ve read before.

This story has linear way of story telling, oppose to conventional story telling, which can be circular. Linear and not circular because the story keeps moving forward and does not necessarily have to relate to some other part of the story. Conventional storytelling keeps moving forward as well but, every part of the story is related and what happens at the beginning effects what happens at the end and what happens at the end is a direct result of what happened at the beginning. In this book nothing is necessarily related to one another, the book keeps moving along not making a single connection from the beginning to end.  

Most stories when they tell something that has no direct effect on the story as a whole it’s just there to describe a particular scene. After the reader has a grasp of the scene, it has no importance to the story anymore. It was told to describe that event at that time, nothing more nothing less.

The entire book is describing a scene in this person life that takes place over an extended period of time. So to me, depending on how you look at it, it makes every part of the story the important part of the story. Every part of this book needs to be remembered, in order to understand the scene of where and how things take place.

“’Who beat his ass,’ said Luis. ‘Kmart. I think they chose him because he looks like he doesn’t care if he gets his ass beat for no reason. I think Kmart saw that in him.’ ‘Kmart beat his ass,’ said Luis.” (29) I thought that was some really funny dialogue.  The thought of Kmart beating somebody’s ass is a thought that would have never entered my mind.