It feels odd to write, or indeed review, a book that states: "For some the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old fashioned, maybe even a little silly" The author of this one even confesses that, while reading, "my concentration starts to drift after a page or two". This must have made the writing, editing and proofreading processes quite tricky. Still, he manfully completed 224 pages and, to judge by the footnotes, must have read a large number of serious tomes in the process.

According to Carr, the internet is to blame for reading becoming so much harder these days. Carr is no luddite. He admits and celebrates how the net has given us access to gigabytes of previously hard-to-find information, has exposed us to the lives and views of an exponentially expanding number of people and communities, and made buying aeroplane tickets really easy (and books too, for that matter).

But, he says, it has altered the way our minds work. The web encourages us to click and flick. Soon all our brains want to do is click and flick. We stop reading novels, and before we know it, "the linear, literary mind" becomes "yesterday's mind".

Carr puts together an informative history of brain science to back up his argument. The latest neuroscience says that our grey matter is malleable and plastic. And as the internet remoulds and rewires the brain in its image, the old book-reading circuits fall out of use and wither.

Unsurprisingly, Carr comes across as someone who is uncomfortable with change. The internet has too many distracting flashing lights; it's a bit noisy. While he points out that he was an early adopter who spent all his savings on a Macintosh SE, he seems more comfortable with digital devices that help him with analogue tasks (such as word processing) than entirely new digital forms, such as Facebook. One begins to wonder whether Carr is mourning the death of the author, the end of narratives and all that, and using neuroscience to vindicate his grieving.

Read this book: you'll learn lots of interesting stuff, lots of thought-provoking theories about the brain, about Google. And if you finish it, you'll have a satisfying sense of having, at an individual level, disproved its thesis. Or buy it, knife out all the pages, bin a few, shuffle the rest and begin to digest. It may not be what the author intended, but you might learn more, and make some stimulating connections along the way  just like you do on the internet.