Saturday Reading Group

Saturday Reading Group | 17/02/2018 | 3:00 pm-4:30 pm


The Saturday Reading Group is for anyone who loves to read, socialize in English, and meet new people.

The February read for the group is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited and Other Stories”.  The story of Charlie Wales, a former drunken party-goer who returns to Paris, the site of his former 1920s debauchery, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Charlie sees his world with new (sober) eyes and is both shocked and appalled by the extravagance that characterized his former life. The story is rooted in the financial crisis of its times. Fitzgerald wrote the piece in December of 1930, when the good times of the Jazz Age (also called the “Roaring Twenties“) had come to an end and America was headed into the Great Depression. Charlie’s horror with his own former waste and self-destruction is Fitzgerald’s condemnation of a society who drank away the ‘ Because of the connections to Fitzgerald’s own life, many critics have looked in painstaking detail at the autobiographical elements of “Babylon Revisited.” Like main character Charlie Wales, Fitzgerald was in a tumultuous and tabloid-ready marriage that was destructive to both him and his wife, Zelda. Fitzgerald also admitted to basing the character of Charlie’s estranged daughter, Honoria, on his own daughter Scottie.

When and where: Meetings will be held in the library once a month on Saturday afternoons starting at 3:00. Cost: FREE to all members of the library. To join: Please contact Anne Kaar at bookgroup@ellia.org


Location: English-language Library in Angers