Books and Such

(Look another post - and so soon!)

First, here's a fast peek at an upcoming show, a collaboration between Mainstage Irving Los Colinas and Think India.  For a few years now they have collaborated on huge (and I mean Huge) story/song/dance spectaculars.  This year I'm designing the sets.  (And I mean Sets: there are not one, not two, but three separate Indian palaces in the story of The Royal Dilemma!)  So here's a just random, warming-up-the-audience Ali Baba style cavern to start out:

Concept sketch for scene 1 of The Royal Dilemma - 

set design by Clare Floyd DeVries, production by Think India/Mainstage Irving Los Colinas

So that's the "and such"... The "books"?  

I recently had a chance to tour a young designer and a student around two of my sets on stage and generally Talk Design - always fun.  Inevitably the subject of books came up (doesn't it always?).  Now I will admit that these days the first attempt at research is always a matter of googling - and I love internet research - but the second, more serious deep-dive always includes books.  The thicker the better.  Every designer I know accumulates at least a modest library.

Here are a few books from my shelves that I refer to often:

Authentic Decor: the Domestic Interior 1620-1920, Peter Thornton

Period Details: a Sourcebook for House Restoration, Martin and Judith Miller

The Elements of Style, Stephen Calloway ed.

And, for the skills, methods, and how to achieve a scenic effect,

Designing and Painting for the Theatre, Lynn Pecktal

Book talk usually wanders off into fiction and "so, read any good books lately?"

Here are a few of my favs:

Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series of magical police novels.  Set in London.  I love the characters and especially the protagonist's wry and snarky voice.

Uprooted by Naomi Kovic.  Another magic-is-real novel, but with a tone like a Russian fairy tale.  (I made the mistake of checking out the Good Reads reviews - wow - this seems to be a love it or hate it book.  Vote me "loved it!")

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel.  I think of it as a post-apocalyptic tale of art and Shakespeare.  It is structured unusually and reminds me, in some ways, of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas another terrific and strangely "accumulating" story, one that gathers weight and meaning as it goes on.

Obviously I've been on a speculative fiction / world-building reading binge.  But I also read other things...  I can highly recommend the odd-duo I'm reading right now, in alternate bites: The Mueller Report, Volume II and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

Moral whiplash, those two together.

"The best revenge is to not be like that."

Marcus Aurelius

Books, Books, Books

I had a very refreshing chat about books the other day.

Nothing is more fun.

(Well, okay, hardy anything.)

What jogged my memory today was a blog post HERE about a new book called Soviet Bus Stops, by Christopher Herwig.  I haven't got my hands on this book yet, but it looks fantastic...  a photo study of ubiquitous, humble - yet socially important - architectural monuments.  These small buildings seem to have received all the whimsy and delight that official Soviet architecture quashed.  Just Google "soviet bus stop" for the wild range of styles.  This one I like as sort of Romanesque-Modern with a flavor of '60s Pop.  (It'd make a cool garden folly.  Please mentally add a blue pool and girls in Holly Golightly sunglasses, sipping martinis.  See it?)

Not sure if this photo is truly from Herwig's Soviet Bus Stops.  

Copyright-holder please let me know if you want it removed.

Folk architecture - whether designed by amateurs or pros - is always lively.

Picture books are fun aren't they?

That book chat was not about architecture or picture books, actually, more on WWII topics.  I'm currently reading Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm.  The man can write!  Another WWII book was recommended to me (but I don't have that note handy); in turn I recommended George McDonald Fraser's The Complete McAuslan, entertaining stories of  a Scottish regiment at the end of that war, and his more serious, excellent memoir of fighting the Japanese in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here. 

A recent good novel about that period I highly recommend is All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.  This read was the result of book club friends recommending it to my mother, she to my sister, then the same copy on to me, then to my child...  That's a catchy book!  I won't spoiler it: let's just say that I had to stay up all night to finish it.  Dawn, I'm sayin'.  Actual dawn.

At about the same time a kindly person lent me a copy of Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.  Also engrossing - apocalypse plus traveling Shakespearean orchestra... how could I resist?  (NPR on it HERE.)  Naturally, I had to give copies of both novels on to others... nothing is as catching as a book.

It's a good week - month! - when you get two excellent new books to read.