Can money buy happiness? It does make the world go ’round, after all!

This reading group considers the lives of the fabulously wealthy, social climbers, the nouveau riche and genteel poor from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. What is the cost—beyond that of money—of accessing and maintaining an elite lifestyle? And at what point is being filthy rich no longer worth the hefty personal price?

This group will meet on the 4th Sunday of the month (with three exceptions) in the Bound at the Athenæum, 2-4pm.

Sat, September 27 (note: this meeting will be on the fourth Saturday)
Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022)
Leo Tolstoy, “Croesus and Fate” (1910)
Ovid, Book XI:85-193 in Metamorphoses

Sun, October 26
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

Sun, November 23
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

Sun, December 21 (note: this meeting is on the third Sunday)
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865)

Sun, January 25
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913)
Metropolitan dir. by Whit Stilman (1990)

Sun, February 22
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Sun, March 22
Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party (1980)
La règle du jeu dir. by Jean Renoir (1939)

Sun, April 26
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)
Optional: Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945)

Sun, May 17 (note: this meeting is on the third Sunday of the month)
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
Optional: Nick McDonell, Twelve (2002)

Sun, June 28 (offsite, location TBD)
Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street (2023)
Optional: Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians (2013)

Tom Sojka started reading In Search of Lost Time in 2015 and hasn’t yet finished. He did, however, complete his PhD in History from Boston University in 2024 and is currently writing a book on elite social life in interwar Britain. When he isn’t drinking a martini or pretending to be a literary critic (sometimes concurrently), he earns his filthy lucre teaching at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven.