Chicken Wing Gingerbread Man

a personal site in chaotic and underperforming flux

Feeling Social

come and find me

Blogs

put a blog on it!!!

Somewhere Other Than Here

a blog about life

Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks

a blog about books

Naming Things is Hard

a blog about tech

Non-Technical Stuff

life ain't all fun and code

Book Reviews

writing elsewhere

  • The Complicities by Stacey D’Erasmo

    "The story begins in the wake of a crime."

    Reviewed at Identity Theory.

  • Radio Iris by Anne-Marie Kinney

    "There's a Kafkaesque layer of weirdness smeared across everything…"

    Reviewed at The Collagist.

  • The American Girl and The Glitter Scene by Monika Fagerholm

    "Monika Fagerholm creates a dark, dramatic, and lyrical world, often insular, full of change and loss.... I fell in love with this world and these books; they are, for me, a fresh reminder of what story itself is about."

    Reviewed at The Collagist.

  • Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr

    "Joshua Mohr’s debut novel...is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road."

    Reviewed at The Collagist.

  • Drowning Tucson by Aaron Michael Morales

    "Fill your book with blatant, modern-day classic, critical thematic concerns and a reviewer ought to have no problem calling them out in an easily digested bullet-point format.... Except, this book hurt. And trying to find a way to talk about that without merely repeating over and over again that this book hurt presents a far greater challenge."

    Reviewed at The Collagist.

  • Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

    "Let me be completely transparent: with Lethem’s work, I approach it with expectations. I expect spice. In this case, I found the book flavorless and cold."

    Reviewed at Identity Theory.

  • Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt

    "Consider the f-bomb: you can trace the trajectory of the story’s heart by the elegant deployment of that dexterous cuss word across the pages of...Laird Hunt’s latest (arguably best, unarguably most emotionally engaging) novel."

    Reviewed at Identity Theory.

  • What Is All This? by Stephen Dixon

    This review includes footnotes.

    Reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation. (The link will take you to Wayback Machine archival snapshot.)

  • The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich

    "It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands, but the harder you hold on to it, the harder it is to hold. In confounding, it rewards: to borrow a line from the book, 'It’s only a problem if you make it one.'"

    Reviewed at The Collagist.

Technical Stuff

life is all fun and code

About...

...me

I'm Darby.

By day I'm a web designer/developer for a college near Cleveland, Ohio.

By the rest of my time, I'm not, which is probably why my web presence is such a mess.

...my interests

Books. Music. Some movies.

Running.

Web stuff, design, coding.

...this site

It's basically a portal page, a list of links to much or most of my stuff on the web.

...the name of the site

Once upon a time I was like "I wanna make myself a website" and then I was like "Ugh that means I have to name it, huh, rude."

Time passed.

Then early in 2019, I welcomed my second son into the world. Babies are funny; they are so tiny. There was, for a bit, a particular swaddle/wrap thing that he liked. It made him look adorably hilarious. I said it made him look like a chicken wing; my wife said it made him look like a gingerbread man. She's more right than I am, of course. Still, the phrase "chicken wing gingerbread man" got stuck in the singsongy regions of my brain.

And then I was like, oh, hey, website. And I bought the domain name.