Even though I am a big fan of Robert Harris and this is one of his more famous books, I had little desire to read Conclave. The premise just didn’t seem that interesting to me, but I ended up reading it since my family wanted to watch the movie.
The whole premise of the book is given to you right in the title since there is nothing particularly unusual about the setup. The pope simply died, and a new one needs to be elected. What made this book good was not the premise, but the fact that it made what appeared to be a somewhat standard situation into something captivating. I didn’t think I would care so much about a papal election, real or fictional, before reading this, but I really did. I found the ending to be kind of disappointing and honestly unnecessary, since it involved an extra plot element that I didn’t really think needed to be there, but other than that I really enjoyed it.
I didn’t mean to make reading books centered or somewhat centered around conclaves a thing, but I think I might have by reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. While the conclave isn’t the most important or central part of this book, it does play a prominent role.
This book focuses on an Illuminati attempt to destroy the Vatican and Catholic church. It was quite fast paced, to the point that I would read 100 pages and be surprised by how fast they had gone. However, I also felt like I had read none of the book after reading these 100 pages.
I quite enjoyed it, but I do think the book got kind of repetitive in the middle. Weirdly enough though, the repetitive bits were still pretty interesting, and it definitely got better towards the end.
Both of these books made conclaves seem more important than I ever expected they could be, but I also don’t think I need to read any more conclave-related books for a little while.
