Lauren Leto’s book Judge a Book By Its Lover is one of the fastest reads I’ve read this year… And it’s all about books.

The book feels like it’s collected from a bunch of blog posts, which it may be I haven’t checked. The first half of the book focuses on the “social” part of books and reading. Lots of pieces in the vein of “how to pick someone in a bookshop” kind of thing or “what you’re reading says about you”.

It felt like it was aimed at female readers and I was close to putting it down and giving it a 2-star review, but I stuck it out and am glad I did.
Once I hit the single largest section of the book “How To Fake Reading An Author” the book really got good. Leto is very well read and funny as well.

That section alone of How to Judge a Book By Its Lover was worth my time with the book. It was crammed with smart conversational observations about well-known authors and their works. And then I got to the essay about leto’s family and her grandmother. It was fantastic. (Ms. Leto, if by chance the Google long-tail-search-algorithmic-gods every bring you to this site, my choppy review can be summed up simply – more like this essay please. I’d buy that.)

I’m recommending this book to my female friends who like books and reading. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

I picked up Tobias Buckell’s book after seeing two different people on Twitter mention it. I thought the setting of Buckell’s Arctic Rising (published by Tor) was fantastic. The book takes place in a future where, thanks to the almost-completely-melted North Pole,  there has been enough of a climate shift that shorelines, shipping routes and political boundaries have changed.

Over the course of a couple of decades, the land uninhabited in our 2012 world near the polar circle becomes the “new” temperate zone, allowing cities to pop up and all of the minerals and once-unreachable natural resources have now made folks north of the U.S. very important and wealthy.

It does not take long for the story to crank up as a global security patrol is shot out of the sky. The rest of the story follows the security pilot as she tries to stay alive, avenge her dead partner and figure out the conspiracy behind it all. A Google-ish type company, with all the “do no evil”, political pull and society-building, plays a major role in all of it as extremists try and use good technology for bad.

The setting, political backdrop and future technology made the book worthwhile for me, even if the plot and story telling were lacking a little. Don’t get me wrong, it is written to keep you turning pages, but it’s not exactly a “I can’t imagine how this ends” story. The stereotypical ending runs its course as it should and might feel like a political statement to some. But it certainly doesn’t get in the way of the fun ride along the way.

As a side note: the publisher places it in a newly named sub-genre called Spi-Fi, which I kind of like. I would look for more books under this moniker. Here’s to hoping Spi-Fi shelf-talkers start showing up alongside Sci-Fi.

I think Arctic Rising would be a great Summer read as it clips along fast and is set up in the arctic, which may help you cool off some while out on the beach. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense and Adwords, 2ed. is one of those books where you take lots of notes. I have been involved with AdWords and AdSense, on a surface level, for a couple of years. So I knew my way around these services. I would say that a third of this book is devoted to screen shots and help with navigation. Which is good, but wasn’t helpful to me. If you are newer to these services then you will love these sections as they are very well pulled together. This also means that a full two-thirds of the book was helpful to me.

The author does talk about staying reader-focused and the need for consistently creative and unique content, but most of the ink is spent on the reason/need for sitemaps, tips for good page layouts, techniques, etc. He does a good job explaining the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ all of these things.

I really like the layout of the book which is in three sections:

1. Making money with a website
2. Cashing in with Adsense
3. Working with Adwords

These allow the author to really setup strategies apart from the tools to execute the strategies. In the first section he even talks about non-Google related “affiliate programs” and some Adsense-competitor networks. All in an effort to show you that Google is not the only way. Which I appreciated. It allows for honest context and back of the napkin type metrics. This is something that a lot of these types of books are lacking. It is these real world tips, based on actual data, that can help you build your site and network. I am talking about tips such as:

• A daily blog post should have 250-300 words. On average, this gives an optimal mix of human-friendly words and keyword saturation (search engine-friendly words).
• If your post/page is over 300 words or if your readers are spending more than a minute on that post/page, then you might want to consider breaking it up which could help with readability and add another chance to display revenue-generating elements.
• A good Click-Through-Rate for ads is 1.5% or better. The author recommends troubleshooting anything lower. He also offers tips on how to troubleshoot and tweak page layouts.

I would recommend this book to anyone who needs a solid introduction to the “how” part of monetizing a website. Advanced folks should look elsewhere. If you’re a developer, you’ll be disappointed in the lack of code. In all honesty, if you follow the right blogs and do a few key Google searches you could probably dig a lot of this up on your own. But it’s nice that I didn’t have to spend my weekend digging and learning. I could just spend it learning. I give this book a solid 3 out of 5 stars and have already recommended to two people.