Join us for the grand finale of the 2024 Winter Read of "The Great Gatsby." We'll party like it's 1924! Come dressed in your best 1920s garb (if you have it), and enjoy music, snacks, and historic photos of the Wood River Valley from the 1920s and inspired by the book’s many great parties. Test your Gatsby knowledge with trivia designed by our Winter Read teen interns and be entered to win great prizes! All are welcome, and dressing up is completely optional. We hope you’ll join us as we close out this year’s community read—celebrating reading a story together!

The bestselling co-author of "The Moscow Rules" and "Argo" tells her riveting, courageous story of being a female spy at the CIA and battling against the prevailing culture of sexism at the time, all while undertaking dangerous missions for America’s safety during the height of the Cold War. Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife," a second-class citizen who was hired as a convenience to her husband’s career, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment, and she performed secretarial duties for the CIA. Mendez's talent for espionage was clear, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at The Agency. She lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, as well as at CIA Headquarters. She confronted dangerous situations that called on her spy training: coming face to face with a rogue Jihadi who had brought down an American plane, and helping steal a top-secret encryption machine from a Soviet embassy, among other high stakes situations. She became an international spy and ultimately Chief of Disguise at CIA’s Office of Technical Service–a kind of ...

In this class on a Hemingway classic, we’ll consider the tension between Nick Adams’s tenuous psychological state and the physical details of fishing and camping that make this story so vivid. As with so many of Hemingway’s characters, there is more going on under the surface than might be apparent on a first read. We’ll explore how the blackened body of a grasshopper can, for a discerning reader, conjure the horrors of war, and how the difference between a clean river and a muddy swamp can convey as much about the psyche as they do about the watershed. As many times as you read this story, you always see something new in it, and so this class will be a collaborative effort of deep reading in which we’ll help one another find what Hemingway has hidden. Attendees should have read both parts of “Big Two-Hearted River” before the class, but familiarity with the entire collection in which the story appears – "In Our Time" – will be helpful in our discussion of how this final story involves material that readers of the original collection would have encountered before. This class will meet at the Library's Wood River Museum of History ...