Book Clubs

Join the Discussion

Book Talk meets monthly on the last Monday of the month at 10:00 am.
This group gathers in the library's meeting room for discussion. Everyone welcome.

Join us in our love of books!
We’ll provide a reading suggestion for each month. You pick your own book to read.

 

Monthly Reading Themes for 2025
January: Beaches/Ocean
February: War
March: Biography
April: Different Culture
May: Historical
June: All read the same title
July: Read the Book From Your Favorite Movie
August: Font on the Cover is a Primary Color
September: Direction in the Title
October: Audiobook
November: Iowa Setting
December: Told in Verse

Oelwein Reads
Thursday, January 22nd at 6:00. p.m.

Oelwein Reads Book Club meets at Ampersand located at 110 South Frederick Ave.
This book club will focus on books about Iowa or the Midwest.  
The book selected is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. 

Book summary:

Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century--1951--in the middle of the United States--Des Moines, Iowa--in the middle of the largest generation in American history--the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)--in his head--as "The Thunderbolt Kid."

Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality--a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson's earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.

Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.