Subtle touch of 'The Readers' proves a hit

Despite the success last year, Dong wanted to add something new into the mix for this new season.

"Topics for this season will be more wide-ranging and varied," she says at a recent premiere for the second series in Beijing.

"The warm key words like 'love' and 'family' will continue, but we will expand this to other social issues with a global interest like environmental protection and organ donation," she explains.

She says more serious works other than best-sellers will be read onstage during season two. Many of the guests, including Yao, had never appeared in a literature-themed show before.

In the first episode, Xue Qikun, a physicist and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recalls his days of painstaking study in Japan, when he joked about his "7-11" schedule-where he arrived at his laboratory at 7 am and left at 11 pm. He read a chapter from Great Learning, a Confucian classic dating back more than 2,000 years, to honor his Chinese predecessors in the field of physics.

Xu Zhuo, a third-generation conservationist for the red-crowned cranes of Heilongjiang province, read a passage from writer Zhang Kangkang's work Hometown of the Big White Birds to reveal her emotions toward the precious bird species that occupy the local wetlands.

Zong Qinghou, an entrepreneur and founder of Wahaha Group, who only began his business at the age of 42, chose a work of prose written by late linguist and historian Ji Xianlin to express his expectations for the younger Chinese generations.

In the upcoming episodes, actor Hu Ge will prove his acting skills through his rendition of a passage from Hamlet. And a Chinese animal conservationist working in Africa, who earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and gave up an enticing offer from a Wall Street firm, will join British zoologist Jane Goodall to read a piece together.

Dong, who hosted the first series but did not take up the position of director until season two, confesses the role has brought many new pressures-but has also given her added impetus.

"One guest told me he had visited many European countries and found that many people there had a habit of reading in public but it seems to be rarer in China," Dong recalls.

"He told me it was never too late to make up for it. His words really cheered me up one of the weariest days of production."

And for Dong, when her production team nearly broke down under the punishing work schedule, reading also provided a way to calm down a heated atmosphere and figure out new solutions.

"When we need to relax, each of us will just pick up our favorite book to read," she says. "It's a good way for all of us to forget our troubles for a while."

According to Dong, reading aloud and expressing emotions in public may not come naturally to many Chinese people, but she hopes the show will help to change all that.