How long does it take to read Vatican?
A Novel
Vatican by Malachi Martin takes about 12 hours 3 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 12 hours 3 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1986. 657 pages, about 180,675 words.
25 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 20 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 12 hours 3 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 32 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The subject of this long and intriguing novel is the Vatican's elaborate bureaucracy, in particular its powerful financial network, headed by a mysterious figure known as the Keeper. Another central character, who gives the story its slant, is American Richard Lansing, who joins the Vatican as a young monsignore in 1945, and becomes the confidant of five successive popes. When he reaches the apex of his career, he staunchly opposes any Church bargain with Mammon. Martin (author of bestsellers The Final Conclave and Hostage to the Devil), was a professor in the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute: he has an insider's knowledge of the intrigues and power plays that go on behind the papacy's smooth facade. His tale encompasses the fall of Mussolini, the penetration of the Vatican by a Soviet mole, the murder of a pope in the Soviet interest (with help from Vatican officials), and other major events real or imagined. Vatican is not unlike a bureaucracy itself: intricate, far from iconoclastic, and impeded in its forward progress by obsessive attention to detail. [Publishers Weekly]
Subjects: Catholics, Clergy, Fiction, Fiction, religious, Vatican city, fiction, Catholic church, clergy, fiction
