What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?
I read Patrick White’s Voss many years ago. At around 450 pages, it is not especially long. But Patrick White is not light reading. His writing is dense, demanding and full of things to think about. I loved it.
Every spare minute I could find, I was reading it: on the commute to work, during lunch, at night. I cannot remember how long it took me to finish, but I do remember that it didn’t feel long.
Voss is loosely based on the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared while travelling through the Australian interior. But what stayed with me was not simply the expedition. It was Voss himself: his passion, insight, ambition and sense of doom.
And then there is the landscape. White captures something of the beauty and anguish of the Australian desert. I can understand why some readers might find the novel interminable. But when you have a love of the outback surging through your veins, it is different. The landscape feels alive. Perhaps that is why the book never seemed long to me.
We do not come to books empty-handed. We bring our own memories, loves and experiences. A book that feels exhausting to one person can be completely absorbing to another because it touches something already alive within them.
Some books make us work and make us want to stop. Others make us work and make us want to go deeper.
The page count tells us very little about that. Perhaps the length of a book is not really measured by the distance between the first page and the last, but by how often we check to see how many pages are left. With Voss, I do not remember doing that at all.
The books that resonate with us can ask a great deal without feeling demanding. We recognise something in them, and often they evoke something in us.
The Afterword 
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