Bookshelf: Chris Verrill, Founder, Beijing Playhouse

The book that changed my life was Lonely Planet: Eastern Europe. Before the Internet, it helped me navigate my first major traveling adventure in 1990. That trip and subsequent travels eventually brought me to China.

The person in Beijing whose bookshelf I’d like a peek at is US Ambassador Gary Locke.

Bathroom reading? Nothing! Get in. Get the job done. Get out. No dilly-dallying.

Book I’m saving for old age? I’ve never in my life reread the same book. But maybe in my old age I’ll reread Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I read the series in college and it started a many-years-long phase of reading science fantasy.

Character in a book I’d like to be … I aspire to the integrity and nobility of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Character in a book I’ve had a crush on … You know that little girl in The Cat in the Hat? When I was a little boy, I had a crush on her. Ssshhh, don’t tell.

Books I wish I hadn’t read are most of my chemistry textbooks from college. Eeegads, I hated chemistry.

The book I’d like to see adapted into a film is any biography of US President Andrew Johnson. He became president upon Lincoln’s assassination at the end of the American Civil War and he was a Southerner – the North had just won the Civil War and yet now there was a Southerner in the White House. Andrew Johnson’s biography is an amazing read.

Book I’ll bring on my next travels? Good question! My plane leaves tomorrow and I don’t know which one to bring. I have 14 to choose from. The one I want to bring, a biography of Grover Cleveland, is too heavy.

My favorite line from a book: “For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” This is the last line of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I played the character that said that line and the audience wept and the lights dramatically came down.

[And … scene. –Ed.]

Catch Beijing Playhouse’s crazy Christmas version of Cinderella between Dec 2-18.

Click here to see the December issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photo: Sui