This was a meandering, scholarly take on the development of books and reading through Greek and Roman times. Interspersed with this were little personal tales from the author herself. If you are interested in this subject or are just an avid reader then I would say this book is pretty close to mandatory. We all think we know this story but the scope of the tale clearly needed some serious research done because there were many things in this book that made me go 'Huh, obviously, how did I miss that?'. Always a good sign for a scholarly work. That being said you will note it's only 4 stars up there on the top line for a work I am describing as 'mandatory'. It's a long book, not necessarily a bad thing and as I just said it had to cover a wide scope. The length, though, was partly down to a high degree of repetition of certain facts or statistics. I found myself thinking a couple of times 'Cmon, Irene, you just said that 40 pages or so ago'. Some things are repeated at least 5 times and because they are notable or surprising facts or statistics, you notice. This is a minor quibble in some ways, as a scholarly work will have a degree of repetition to reinforce the learnings. I felt it was enough to just take the fifth star away, I am afraid. I still highly recommend this book though, my quibble might very well not be yours.