University News

WIU Libraries’ Espionage Book Club Meets This Summer

April 15, 2021

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MACOMB, IL – Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously (perhaps too famously) wrote:

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Yet, for some, in the spring their fancy turns to thoughts of espionage, namely the Espionage Book Club at Western Illinois University, which runs from the middle of May to the end of June. When others' "bosoms are shaken with a storm of sighs," our minds turn to the secret missions of cold blooded spies. At a time when "Love t[akes] up the glass of Time, and turns it in his glowing hands;" we think of time running out as a spy makes her way across the Pyrenees barely ahead of the Gestapo, a spy whispering to herself, "I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair."

If you enjoy espionage novels, if you like stories that happen by, "the light of London (or Paris, Moscow, or Berlin) flaring like a dreary dawn," when, "all order festers, all things here are out of joint," join the WIU Libraries' Espionage Book Club this May and June. The club is open to anyone.

The club's first book will be David Downing's new prequel to his Berlin "Station" series, "Wedding Station." The discussion of the book will tentatively take place Friday, May 21.

The second book in the series will be Jane Healey's, "The Secret Stealers" for Friday, June 11.

The final book will be discussed Friday, June 25. It will be Richard O'Rawe's new thriller, "Northern Heist," which concerns a bank robbery and the IRA.

The meetings will take place over Zoom and will last up to one hour hour. The club will traditionally meet at 12:03 p.m.

The Espionage Book Club may decide, as it sometimes does, to meet one more time in August before school starts. July, of course, is reserved for various book club members' most secret missions.

Those with an interest in joining can email Bill Thompson at wat100.thompson@gmail.com.



Posted By: University Communications (U-Communications@wiu.edu)
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