Welcome Abigail!

We are pleased to welcome Abigail (AbigailAdams26) as our new project specialist. She is taking over from Meg here on LibraryThing.com. Abigail* is a long-time LibraryThing member, with an interesting library and a ton of reviews.

Check out our blog post and welcome her aboard.

*Yes, our second Abigail. But from now on Ablachly is "Abby" and AbigailAdams26 is "Abigail." Yes, we're an eight-person company with two Chrises and two Abigails—help!

Congrats Abigail!!

Hi, Abigail, say hello to John!

Welcome, Abigail!

It makes for easy finger pointing when the occasion demands it.

Someone who read (and reviewed) Hlapić, the first book that completely sucked me into its world and consumed me until I was finished at the age of six

Welcome and congrats

Welcome, Abigail! Your prolific book reviewing is a thing of wonder and an inspiration to me to get cracking on my own overdue reviews. :-)

Thanks, everyone! I am very glad to be here.

SandraArdnas: I'd really like to read Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's collection of Croatian folktales, at some point, but you know how that goes. So many books, so little time. I'm very interested in translated children's literature. Are there other Croatian authors I should keep an eye out for?

Rosalita: reviewing is a form of discipline for me, but also entertaining. I think of it as a kind of reading log, for my own purposes, but am happy if what I write is useful to others as well.

>1 timspalding: >8 AbigailAdams26: welcome Abigail! That is a lot of reviews! I hope TIM (and us lot) allows you enough time to continue writing them!

Welcome! With Chris and Abigail and Tim, we have the letters ACT covered, so adding someone with the letter G would be good :-) (ACGT are the letters used to form the genetic code of DNA). Since DNA is a double spiral, this also explains why we need two of each name :-)

Congrats!

I've long enjoyed your reviews of children's books. Thanks for writing them.

>8 AbigailAdams26:

Hi, welcome. Like Sandra, I too count "Čudnovate zgode..." among my childhood favourites. (A more faithful translation would go something like "The curious adventures of apprentice Hlapić".) It's unusual and nice to meet an American who's read it. By the way, speaking of the collection of tales, Brlić-Mažuranić wrote them herself. Many are based on some folk motifs and Slavic mythology, but they are not actually folk tales.

Since I'm digressing, might as well mention (as I'm sure I did in the past!) that it's a pity that her lovely evocative title, approximately "Stories from antiquity" gets traded for a humdrum "Croatian folktales" but branding is everything, I guess.

Welcome!

welcome Abigail!

Thanks again, everyone!

reading_fox: I love your user name and profile picture! I wrote my masters dissertation on children's retellings of The History of Reynard the Fox, and love anything fox-related.

bnielsen: Very cool! Soon LT will have everything needed to build life! ;)

libraryperilous: I'm so glad my reviews have been of use for you.

LolaWalser: Thank you for the heads up, regarding Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's collection of tales. I had seen them described as folktales, which is why I referred to them in that way. The actual translated title name, in English, is Croatian Tales of Long Ago. It's a shame more English-language readers haven't encountered her work, but the translations done of "Čudnovate zgode..." (there are a number of different ones, under different titles) are all long out of print, and not always easy to find, alas.

Welcome, Abigail! Based on your favorite authors listed on the blog post, we ought to be best friends. :-) Two of my all-time favorite books are The Blue Castle and Beauty. I'm a children's librarian, so children's lit is an abiding passion of mine.

If you're on Instagram, you might look up illustrator Ben Hatke -- during the pandemic, he did a series on Reynard the fox.

>16 foggidawn: Thanks, foggidawn! I read and reread both of those titles countless times as a girl. As for Hatke, I know his work, but didn't know about the Reynard - thank you!

This is to wish you a really good time here on LT. I’m writing from Italy. Please make this place lively and happy. We’re living hard times but we’ll survive. God bless from a bibliomaniac dinosaur.

Welcome to where you already are!

>10 bnielsen: katemcangus has a dog lovingly nicknamed Gus, does that count? As for a second G and T... apparently we just need some gin and tonics supplied to us.

>20 kristilabrie: Ah, that's a good idea. Gin and Tonic to the rescue :-)

Welcome to Abigail, but man LT seems to be churning through employees lately...

>22 gilroy:

It may seem so, and boy-oh-boy do I hate big hiring processes, but I don't think the numbers bear it out. Meg was here for 6 months, indeed. But Meg replaced KJ, who had been with us seven years and left to go to school. The last employee who joined, Lucy, was a new position—we hadn't had a fourth programmer for five years. The median years at LT for our current employees is now 11 years, the mean 9, which is pretty amazing for any company, still less a tech company. (The national average is 4.6 years in a job, and younger and tech people definitely change jobs a lot more than the national average.) Indeed, given our current size, we *should* have two new people every year! (Thank God we don't, as the search process is murder!)

>23 timspalding: I think it just feels like we burn through the "face" of LT more quickly than most of the other employees.

Congratulations, Abigail! We're lucky to have you here.

Thanks again, everyone!

>8 AbigailAdams26: As far as children's literature is concerned Druzba Pere Kvrzice is a classic here, but I don't think it has been translated. Ivan Kušan has a number of books to recommend and at least one was translated to English. As LolaWalser already pointed out, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's collection of Croatian folktales is really her original fairytales which contain elements of Slavic mythology. Many of those are absolutely superb, but very different from the adventure story of Hlapić.

In the adult realm, my all-time favorite and one I would recommend over Nobel-prize winning Andrić is Death and the Dervish.

Welcome on board, Abigail! Good to see a familiar name moving upstairs.

Congrats on having a valid excuse to spend all day here now!

>27 SandraArdnas: Thank you, Sandra! I have one from Ivan Kušan on my to-read shelf, and hope to get to it at some point. It's a shame that none of Mato Lovrak's books appear to be translated. Perhaps one day. Thank you also for the adult suggestion - I will keep it in mind.

Thank you, davidgn and clamairy!

>24 gilroy: If it helps, I am one of the faces of LT—at least when it comes to member interactions—and this is the longest job I've held since I can remember. Almost 7 years now and going strong! As an employee, I can speak to the value and understanding of "work-life balance" that Tim & Co. have for the work that we do, which is naturally going to allow for more opportunities to discover and follow other passions in life.* I see that as a big strength and positive for LibraryThing's work culture, and for the company as a whole.

*A bit off-topic, but I even just certified myself as a personal trainer last year, and am getting additional certifications this year. It's hard to say if I'll ever decide to leave LT to pursue that passion full-time, but I appreciate having the energy in life to do what I'm doing now, because the job I have doesn't suck the life out of me. I rather enjoy what I do here, and I love who I work with.

**ETA: I was not paid to write this, although I did write it on company time...

>32 kristilabrie:

Get back to your oar!

"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

Welcome to the evil Abigail! Or wait... the good one? I can't tell them apart!

>35 MrAndrew: With all of these cases of two employees with the same name, it does kind of seem like Tim is trying to bring balance to the Force.

>35 MrAndrew: Do you suspect any connections to The Addams Family?

>35 MrAndrew: I'm definitely the evil one.

>39 hamid2000: Welcome to LibraryThing. But this is certainly the wrong spot to ask; and this site does not intend to help you find and acquire books.
However, as a friendly gesture, I looked it up. A member has tagged it Dover, so I searched for it at Dover Publications, where you can order it for the price of $15.96

https://doverpublications.ecomm-search.com/m?formSubmitted=true&keywords=Sta...

Also posted to member’s profile in case he doesn’t know to look back here.

>40Thanks💐

I wanted to see the profile of who was writing these great Dr Seuss reviews and then I thought, wait I've seen this photo someplace else ... lol. Welcome!

>42 Cecrow: Thank you, Cecrow! And thank you for the comments you left on some of my profile photos. I'm not able to respond to those comments at the moment, as there's a bug we're working on, that prevents it. I'm definitely not ignoring them!