How long does it take to read Symphony for the City of the Dead?
Symphony for the City of the Dead by M. T. Anderson takes about 8 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2015. 464 pages, about 127,600 words. Written for children.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 11 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 19 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the Siege of Leningrad and the role played by Russian composer Shostakovich and his Leningrad Symphony. In September 1941, Adolf Hitler s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943 1944. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents burned books, furniture, and floorboards to keep warm; they ate family pets and eventually one another to stay alive. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens the Leningrad Symphony, which came to occupy a surprising place of prominence in the eventual Allied victory.
Subjects: Composers, History, Biography, Music and the war, Music, Morale
