TV BY THE BOOK

A new series aims to encourage reading by staging unique adaptations of influential books, Fang Aiqing and Xu Fan report.

Dressed in a tuxedo, actor Zhao Lixin, with his signature black curly hair, steps onto a stage on the set of the popular TV show, The Wonderful Read, in Shunyi district, Beijing.

"I'm a budding writer trying to blend in with the elite society of London," he says loudly. Zhao plays the first-person narrator in the show's first episode, which recounts the tale of English writer W. Somerset Maugham's classic novel, The Moon and Sixpence.