How long does it take to read Shenzhen?
Shenzhen by Guy Delisle takes about 2 hours 47 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 47 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2000. 152 pages, about 41,800 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 47 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From Publishers Weekly Last year's Pyongyang introduced Delisle's acute voice, as he reported from North Korea with unusual insight and wit, not to mention wonderfully detailed cartooning. Shenzhen is not a follow-up so much as another installment in what one hopes is an ongoing series of travelogues by this talented artist. Here he again finds himself working on an animated movie in a Communist country, this time in Shenzhen, an isolated city in southern China. Delisle not only takes readers through his daily routine, but also explores Chinese custom and geography, eloquently explaining the cultural differences city to city, company to company and person to person. He also goes into detail about the food and entertainment of the region as well as animation in general and his own career path. All of this is the result of his intense isolation for three months in an anonymous hotel room. He has little to do but ruminate on his surroundings, and readers are the lucky beneficiaries of his loneliness. As in his earlier work, Delisle draws in a gentle cartoon style: his observations are grounded in realism, but his figures are light cartoons, giving the book, as Delisle himself remarks, a feeling of an alternative Tintin. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Delisle's Pyongyang (2005) documented two months spent overseeing cartoon production in North Korea's capital. Now he recounts a 1997 stint in the Chinese boomtown Shenzhen. Even a decade ago, China showed signs of Westernization, at least in Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen, where Delisle found a Hard Rock Cafe and a Gold's Gym. Still, he experienced near-constant alienation. The absence of other Westerners and bilingual Chinese left him unable to ask about baffling cultural differences ranging from exotic shops to the pervasive lack of sanitation. Because China is an authoritarian, not totalitarian, state, and Delisle escaped the…
Subjects: Fiction, China, description and travel, China, social life and customs, Comics & graphic novels, general, Comic books, strips, etc., China, fiction
