Sometimes the longest book is not the one with the most pages. Sometimes it is the book whose insides, if you will, make every page feel like a journey. I have read thick books packed with words that pulled me forward, and others that made me falter, stop, or sit quietly and think.

If we are counting pages, with my Southern roots showing, Gone with the Wind belongs on my list. I once challenged War and Peace, but peace won—I never finished it. I did read Jean M. Auel’s entire Earth’s Children series, including The Plains of Passage, which stretches past 700 pages. But does a series, trilogy, or set count as one very long read? My bookshelves would like the answer to be yes.

One book, or rather, seven volumes… still waits on my someday list. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At roughly 1.2 million words, it follows a narrator’s memories from childhood into adulthood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. Yes, my English-major side is showing now. I do not own it yet, but perhaps this is the push I need to go find it.

And then there is the Bible—the book that changes everything. Each time I read it, I find a new meaning, a new thought, or a new guide for living. So perhaps a book’s true length is not measured in pages or words, but in how long it stays with us: how deeply it asks us to look, how slowly it reveals its secrets, and how often it calls us back to begin again.

So, as I said in the beginning, sometimes the longest book is not a page count or a word count, but rather the insides of it are more formidable, more overwhelming, more descriptive and telling, and it takes longer time to read it, to take it in, and to discover what its secrets are…