Buddy read ~ The Accursed

As already announced in my Hello September post, Lisa @Capitvated Reader and myself are planning a buddy read for October:

Oates, Joyce Carol "The Accursed" - 2013.

Here is Lisa's detailed description including questions:

And this is the book description:

"This eerie tale of psychological horror sees the real inhabitants of turn-of-the-century Princeton fall under the influence of a supernatural power. New Jersey, 1905: soon-to-be commander-in-chief Woodrow Wilson is president of Princeton University. On a nearby farm, Socialist author Upton Sinclair, enjoying the success of his novel 'The Jungle', has taken up residence with his family. This is a quiet, bookish community - elite, intellectual and indisputably privileged. But when a savage lynching in a nearby town is hushed up, a horrifying chain of events is initiated - until it becomes apparent that the families of Princeton have been beset by a powerful curse. The Devil has come to this little town and not a soul will be spared. 'The Accursed' marks new territory for the masterful Joyce Carol Oates - narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling fantastical elements to stunning effect."

Our schedule is as follows (more details in Lisa's post).

Week 1 (Oct 1–Oct 8) Book 1 (Chapters 1–4)
Week 2 (Oct 9–Oct 16) Book 2 & Book 3
Week 3 (Oct 17–Oct 24) Book 4 & Book 5
Week 4 (Oct 25–Oct 31) Book 6 to End

We also will write  a new post every Friday in October (Oct 9, 16, 23, and 30) with discussion prompts, character trackers, and space to share your thoughts.

Looking forward to sharing this with you.

Book Quotes

  

"Think not of the books you’ve bought as a 'to be read' pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood." Luc van Donkersgoed

I don't drink wine but I love the comparison. Nobody looks at someone who has a huge wine cellar and thinks it's useless to have them all. But buy more than two books and you have a problem.

"Nothing scares away bad dreams faster than the rustle of printed paper." Cornelia Funke

Totally true. Books can be so calming.

"The kindred joy of having discovered someone who read the same book was immediate, a friend whose mind had resided once in the same fictional world." Madeline Martin, The Secret Book Society

I think that is the secret of our blogging society. We are all readers and that's why we get on so well.

Find more book quotes here. 

Brooks, Geraldine "Memorial Days

Brooks, Geraldine "Memorial Days: A Memoir" - 2025

I love Geraldine Brooks. She writes great books, both novels and non-fiction. However, I am not sure I should have read this book now. My (younger) brother died after three years of battling a brain tumor. As soon as he was buried, his wife was diagnosed with liver cancer and she died nine weeks and a day after him. It wasn't a good time to read about someone else's grief.

Or was it? Geraldine Brooks has a great way of trying to come to terms with the sudden death of her husband and she gives a lot of tips along the way. Not necessarily all practical one though there is one toward the end. She recommends to make a list and call it "Your Life: How It Works" and write down all the little things you do without anyone noticing. Where are certain keys kept? Where do you find passwords? Insurance documents? Etc. etc. 

The book is both sad and devastating as well as comforting. At least I thought so. The author does give us hope, though.

Some books she recommends on the same topic, I have read one of them:
Alexander, Elizabeth "The Light of the World"
Didion, Joan "The Year of Magical Thinking"
Oates, Joyce Carol "A Widow's Story" - 2011

From the back cover:

"It was Memorial Day, 2019, when Geraldine Brooks received news that her husband, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died, far from home, in the middle of his own book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him.

Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to remote Flinders island off the coast of Tasmania. There, she pondered the ways other cultures deal with mourning and finally seized the time and space she needed for her own grief. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a 35-year marriage filled with risk, adventure, humour and love.

A spare and moving memoir that join sthe classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life love affair and a reckoning with the inevitability of loss."

Blogger Problems

If you haven't received any comments from me lately, it's because Blogger has had problems for more than a week. I don't get any notifications of posts from the blogs I follow. I hope you get some about me but if not, I am very sorry. I cannot believe that Blogger cannot fix this kind of problem within a day or two. Let's hope they get on their feet soon.

Némirovsky, Irène "All Our Wordly Goods"

Némirovsky, Irène "All Our Wordly Goods" (French: Les Biens de ce monde) - 1941

The Classicics Spin chose #18 from our list this month. This was my book.

I have read two books by Irène Némirovsky before (Suite Française and The Prey) which I both quite liked. So, I was looking forward to this one.

And I was not disappointed. "All Our Wordly Goods" was even better than the two others, probably because she finished it before she was killed.

The story starts in WWI and lasts until 1940. We live through two words, well, at least the beginning of the second one. But we see them as the ordinary people had to live them, not the soldiers. Yes, the men get taken away to fight at the front but their stories are only secondary. We see what the old people, the women and children have to go through.

A fascinating, captivating story. The characters are all very vivid.

From the back cover:

"In haunting ways, this gorgeous novel prefigures Irène Némirovsky’s masterpiece Suite Française.

Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and his grandfather, the tyrannical family patriarch. Their marriage provokes a family feud that cascades down the generations. This brilliant novel is full of drama, heartbreak, and the telling observations that have made Némirovsky’s work so beloved and admired."

Here are all the books on my original Classics Club list.
And here is a list of all the books I read with the Classics Spin.

Frankel, Laurie "Family Family"

Frankel, Laurie "Family Family" - 2024

The other members:
Becky from Sydney of Aidanvale
Kate from Melbourne of booksaremyfavoriteandbest - Family Family 
Naomi from Canada of Consumed By Ink
Rebecca from Maryland, USA of Bookish Beck - Family Family 
Kay from Washington State, USA of What? Me Read? - Family Family 

The first I read with the online group "literary Wives" that we re-named "The Marriage Plot"  since not all the books we plan to read are about wives.

As in this case. The topic is adoption.

I was wondering about the title at first. But then I got it. You have families that are just a family on paper. Then you have family that are even not an official family but the people there belong together. And that is a family family. And I think that is a good description. You certainly know families who hardly get on, who don't see each other anymore once the children moved out, but even before, they don't relate to the others. That is not a family family, that's just a bunch of people who seem to live in the same house and (sometimes) carry the same name).

In this case we have a really weird family. A woman who gets two children without being married and gives them up for adoption, to two different kind of parents, a single mother and a gay married couple. But she also adopts two kids who have been abandoned by their mother. So, we have all sorts of relationships.

The woman is an actress and plays in a film about adoption. She claims that not all adoptions are sad and that the film is not a good one. That leads to a big scandal and her adopted kids try to get the whole family together.

I think this is a good book about showing a different side of adoption, one you don't read about that often. And I know families where it worked perfectly.

There are so many different kind of characters in this book, starting with the ten year old adopted daughter up to the grandmother. Every person is so different, as they should be. And they all have a point.

You can tell that the author has experienced this in her own family. A good quote by her (in the Seattle Times):

"Adoption is always offered as this last-resort, second-best thing that you have settled for, ... there are lots of ways to make good families and lots of ways to make crappy ones ... and they are not necessarily dictated by blood and genetics." So true.

From the back cover:

''Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?'

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.

Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.

Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help–and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother…

The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it's complicated."

And here is the list of all our books.

Six Degrees of Separation ~ Shutter Island

Dennis Lehane

"Shutter Island"

#6Degrees of Separation:

from Shutter Island to Treasure Island

#6Degrees is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. I love the idea. Thank you, Kate. See more about this challenge, its history, further books and how I found this here. 

This month, we are supposed to start with our book group’s current selection.

Nice idea for next month. Unfortunately, we already had the book we read in my local club (The Correspondent, in April 2026) as a starter book and I cannot get the one for my online group. And the last ones were all German books. Also, the current online book is in Finnish and not translated. But, I decided to use the last online book we read that has an English edition: "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane.

Book Description:

"An arresting psychological thriller in which two US Marshals hunting for an escaped mental patient unveil a nightmare world of CIA drug trials, Nazi inspired eugenic work, and repressive mind control.

In the year 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate an unexplained disappearance. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept under constant surveillance in a locked, guarded cell. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on the island, hints of radical experimentation and covert government machinations add darker, more sinister shades to an already bizarre case. Because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems."

Once again, I decided to go with a word in the title, it was too good an opportunity to pass.

Allende, Isabel "Island Beneath the Sea" (E: La isla bajo el mar) - 2010

A great description of life on a plantation, first in the Caribbean, later in Louisiana, the life of the slaves and the free, lots of history, an incredibly rich account of the lives people had to lead. 

Hislop, Victoria "The Island" - 2005

An interesting book about a wonderful part of this world with a harrowing past. The island was used as a leper colony from 1903 to 1957. People who were banned there wouldn’t return into normal life until a cure was found.

This book reflects on the lives of the people on this island, how they got there, how their everyday life as, how life was for those left behind, how the people in the little village just opposite the island was. The author managed to illustrate all this through a family who was involved in the whole history. 

Lindgren, Astrid "Seacrow Island" (SW: Vi på Saltkråkan) - 1964 

There are a couple of families in Sweden with children of the same age. The Melkerson family goes on holiday on a skerry, a little rocky island in Sweden. Together with oder holiday children and children from the island, they have the most fabulous holidays. A lovely children's story.

O'Dell, Scott "Island of the Blue Dolphins" - 1969

The Native American girl Karana ends up on a deserted island where she spends the next eighteen years alone. The story tells about her life, her struggles to survive.

Şafak, Elif "The Island of Missing Trees" - 2021

We have the Greek Kostas and Turkish Defne live on Cyprus, the divided island. They fall in love but - as usual in such cases - their love is forbidden.

Stevenson, Robert Louis "Treasure Island" - 1881/82 

Not just a children's book, the story is also interesting for adults, quite some excitement going on, you need to guess what might happen next and won't succeed every time.

A lot of drama and action in the story. A true classic.   

The connection between the first and the last book? Like last month, the titles all contain the same word: ISLAND.

📚📚📚