CULTURE AND CONVERSATION

Your chief handicap to social success will always be the fact that you did not attend the right kindergarten with any of the right crowd. This eliminates you from participating in seventy percent of the conversations that occur during dinner parties at the best houses. You do not know the gossip that goes back to these people’s childhoods. And this is the secret: They are all still completely obsessed with what happened when they were five. Who was fat or thin? Who wet her pants during choir practice? Who’s father shut down Ocean Park for the day so that he could have a huge birthday party? Who spilled red bean soup all over whose party dress when they were six years old and still has not been forgiven? Twenty percent of the other conversations at parties consist of complaining about Mainlanders, so by default you will not be able to join in that discussion. Another five percent is earmarked for complaining about the Chief Executive, so in order to distinguish yourself in the remaining meager five percent conversational window, you must either have one hell of a good stock tip or learn to become a scintillating conversationalist. Beauty fades, but wit will keep you on the invitation lists to all the most exclusive parties. To that end, you will embark on a reading program that I have designed specifically for you. You will also attend one cultural event per week. This can include but is not restricted to plays, opera, classical music concerts, ballet, modern dance, performance art, literary festivals, poetry readings, museum exhibitions, foreign-language or independent films, and art openings. (Hollywood movies, Cirque du Soleil, and Cantopop concerts do not count as culture.)

READING LIST

I noticed many magazines but not a single book in your entire house, with the exception of a Chinese-language translation of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In found in one of the maid’s bedrooms. You will therefore complete one book per fortnight, with the exception of Trollope, where you will be allowed three weeks per book. As you read these books, you will hopefully come to understand and appreciate why I am making you read them. The books are to be read in the following order:

Snobs by Julian Fellowes

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

People Like Us by Dominick Dunne

The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy)

Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge

The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

D. V. by Diana Vreeland

A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi

Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice

Edith Wharton—The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth (must be read in strict order—you will understand why when you finish the last one)

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Anthony Trollope—all the books in the Palliser series, beginning with Can You Forgive Her?