How long does it take to read Matterhorn?
A Novel of the Vietnam War
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes takes about 10 hours 58 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 58 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2010. 598 pages, about 164,450 words.
22 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 16 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 58 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.
Subjects: Vietnam war, Fiction, Fiction, war & military, United States Marine Corps, Romans, nouvelles, Cuerpo de Marina
