It shouldn't take anywhere near that long. Here is how you might use the Universal Feed Parser.
# easy_install feedparser
And an example of using it:
import feedparserfeed = 'http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=python&sort=newest'd = feedparser.parse(feed)for entry in d['entries']: print entry.title
The documentation shows you how to pull other things out of a feed. If there is a specific issue you have, please post the details.