What I'm Reading: Underworld by Don DeLillo

This thing is a beast! While there are lots of great passages and scenes that seem impossible to forget, there's also a distinct lack of a real plot to drive the action, or so it seems at the four-hundred-page mark - that is, about halfway in.  I had the good fortune of being introduced to DeLillo through a contemporary-lit class at Temple, and White Noise remains one of my favorite works of fiction. It took on a huge subject - American consumer culture - without ever getting bogged down by its own treatment of the subject. I'm not so sure, by the end of this one, I'll feel the same, but regardless it is an ambitious work, and the prologue describing the last game of the 1951 Dodgers-Giants series is rightly called among the best writing of its time.

Publications

Just to kick things off, here's a semi-complete list of my publications.

• My poem, "Shelter," is featured in the 2012 edition of Hyphen, the undergraduate literary magazine at Temple University.
• I wrote quite a few articles for Live Wire, the student newspaper at HACC Lancaster, while I was the assistant editor there. 
• I co-founded the popular urban-exploration blog ForgottenPA.
• I also have just under a hundred web-content pieces (mostly product reviews and tech columns) at Yahoo! Contributor Network.
• While stretching the idea of "publication," I also did rather workmanlike transcriptions of video tutorials over at BlueFX. This says more about me as a hands-on worker than a writer, but I think it's important to mention.

What's missing? Quite a bit, actually. The poem and flash-fiction piece I wrote for Voices, the literary magazine at HACC, where I was assistant editor; the year-long technology column I wrote for The Lake Superior Voice; two articles on music theory I published in the Lancaster New Era, a local daily; and, mercifully, the columns I wrote for the now-defunct League of American Dumbasses (theLOAD.org), as well as a few other screeds and tracts from my teenage days.

I hope to add substantially to my publications in the near future, especially in the creative-writing arena. Though I've been focused on learning the short-story form over the past couple years, I have yet to sell a piece. This has been kind of a chip on my shoulder, but I can also look at the things I produced a while back and understand why they failed to sell, which says a lot to me about my development thus far.