How long does it take to read The House of Life?
Mario Praz
The House of Life by Mario Praz takes about 6 hours 36 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 36 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1964. 360 pages, about 99,000 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 36 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 8 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In simplest terms, it is a house tour, but Praz's Roman apartment was no ordinary house it was a wunderkammer, a house of wonders, rooms replete with objects d'art and sculpture, walls hung with paintings and prints, bureaus overflowing with postcards and ephemera. And Praz is no ordinary guide; he leads you, the reader, through each room lecturing on the objects therein. What emerge are his passions, his immense erudition, his insatiable curiosity, his undeniable amiability, his infectious enthusiasm. What might have been a predictable didactic exercise is transformed and expanded into a multi-layered disquisition on the nature of art, on the challenge of investigation and discovery, on the idiosyncrasies of personalities, on the serendipitous way in which art and the objects we choose to surround us tell stories that go far beyond their purely physical attributes.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Interior decoration, Biography, Homes and haunts, Art, Collectors and collecting
