As the media focus on the business of e-books, ardent readers ponder the effects electronic devices are having on what and how we read and the viability of literary culture. Ulin, book critic at the Los Angeles Times, confesses to his own changed reading habits as he partakes of “the instant gratifications of the information stream” in this thoughtful, candid, and gratifyingly balanced inquiry. He writes with surpassing eloquence and insight about what books have meant to him since childhood, his son’s reading of The Great Gatsby and his own rereading of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, and how books “serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, bigger than mere commerce.” Quoting Thomas Paine, Kerouac, Vonnegut, and Didion, Ulin is wisely open-minded in his grappling with the growing complexity and attendant ambiguity of our changing approaches to writing and reading, creating a genuinely reflective and resonant chapter in the story of the book. And his closing vision of a “quiet revolution” in which reading “is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction” is most inspiriting