Too many posts cause slow load when paginating

I have about 10k posts and I made a page that lists all posts but it is paginated every 54posts. It gives 131 queries in 6.730 seconds which is pretty slow to load. Is there a way to make it load faster?

This is my functions page

?php
/* Custom code goes below this line. */

add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'aside', 'gallery' ) );
add_filter( 'use_default_gallery_style', '__return_false' );

/* Add the Javascript */
$path = get_stylesheet_directory_uri() .'/js/';
wp_enqueue_script('post-navigation', $path.'jquery.navigate.js', array('jquery'));

function catch_that_image() {
global $post, $posts;
$first_img = '';
ob_start();
ob_end_clean();


$transformed_content = apply_filters('the_content',$post-post_content);


$output = preg_match_all('/img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*/i', $transformed_content, $matches);
$first_img = $matches [1] [0];

if(empty($first_img)){ //Defines a default image
$first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
}
return $first_img;
}

function pagination($pages = '', $range = 4)
{  
     $showitems = ($range * 2)+1;  

     global $paged;
     if(empty($paged)) $paged = 1;

     if($pages == '')
     {
         global $wp_query;
         $pages = $wp_query-max_num_pages;
         if(!$pages)
         {
             $pages = 1;
         }
     }   

     if(1 != $pages)
     {
         echo "div class=\"pagination\"spanPage ".$paged." of ".$pages."/span";
         if($paged  2  $paged  $range+1  $showitems  $pages) echo "a href='".get_pagenum_link(1)."'laquo; First/a";
         if($paged  1  $showitems  $pages) echo "a href='".get_pagenum_link($paged - 1)."'lsaquo; Previous/a";

         for ($i=1; $i = $pages; $i++)
         {
             if (1 != $pages ( !($i = $paged+$range+1 || $i = $paged-$range-1) || $pages = $showitems ))
             {
                 echo ($paged == $i)? "span class=\"current\"".$i."/span":"a href='".get_pagenum_link($i)."' class=\"inactive\"".$i."/a";
             }
         }

         if ($paged  $pages  $showitems  $pages) echo "a href=\"".get_pagenum_link($paged + 1)."\"Next rsaquo;/a";  
         if ($paged  $pages-1   $paged+$range-1  $pages  $showitems  $pages) echo "a href='".get_pagenum_link($pages)."'Last raquo;/a";
         echo "/div\n";
     }
}

// This function should go in functions.php
function mam_posts_where ($where) {
   global $mam_global_where;
   if ($mam_global_where) $where .= " $mam_global_where";
   return $where;
}
add_filter('posts_where','mam_posts_where');

/* Custom code goes above this line. */
?

And this is my page template

?php
/*
Template Name: List
*/
?

?php get_header(); ?

        div id="container"
            div id="content2" role="main"

?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$args = array( 'post_type' = 'post', 'posts_per_page' = 54, 'paged' = $paged );
$wp_query = new WP_Query($args);
while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?
div class="seriesbox"
a class="size-thumbnail" href="?php the_permalink(); ?"img src="?php echo catch_that_image() ?"//a
div class="seriestitle"h2?php the_title() ?/h2/div
/div
?php endwhile; ?

!-- then the pagination links --
?php if (function_exists("pagination")) {
    pagination($additional_loop-max_num_pages);
} ?

            /div!-- #content --
        /div!-- #container --

        ?php get_footer(); ?