A Year in the Merde
by Stephen Clarke

I found this book about a Brit's impressions on life in Paris, very very entertaining, Its a genuinely laugh out loud kind of a book with written in style by Stephen Clarke under the pseudo narration by a character Paul West. For those who don't know Merde is not the name of some posh suburb but actually is the french translation for "Shit"

I picked it up because it promised humour starting from its cover, the back cover said "A Year in the Merde is an almost-true account of things that may or may not have happened to him in the ten years he has lived in France, depending on who is asking the question. He originally published the book in an edition of 200 copies, with the intention of selling them through his website, giving them away to friends or offering them as fuel for his neighbour's Bastille Day barbecue."

Well I can't really write anything better than what has been written about this book in so many places, to get the hang of the storyline see this or go here to read a better informed review on the book.

For my part I just enjoyed the book thoroughly, the way he takes potshots at the French and their language , work(or actually Strike) culture and their little idiosyncrasies. For someone like me whose idea of night life is a good book or some good company , he paints a good picture of the hot an happening night clubs in Paris and his sexual misadventures. In all I found it immensely entertaining and can be a good read if all you are looking for is a hearty laugh.

The Street 2 : Confessions of an Undercover cop

Lachlan McCulloch

Lachlan McCulloch was an officer with the Victorian (A state in Australia) For all those crime thrillers and detective serial addicts, this is a book that you have been waiting for. The author Lachlan McCulloch is a copper. The Good guy fighting and bad guys on the relatively peaceful streets of Melbourne. Frankly speaking I am amazed at the peace and absence of crime in this city. Perhaps the credit goes to officers like Mr McCulloch.

This is a fairly small book less than 250 pages, and is very fast paced, with every chapter denoting one particular case in his life as a police officer. These are real accounts of his experiences, each different and captivating. Sometimes you can have the best of experiences but that does not necessarily translate into excellent writing. Bad writing can convert even the best of experiences / subjects in to clumsy, dull & bland monotones. For example Indian writers writing about sex. For an example of how good writing can convert simple and mundane into really interesting, have a look here where Waiter writes about a simple bus trip and moves you.

In these terms I would say the book is very well written since the author writes about a live experience and gets life into the words so well that we can see what's happening. Also each story/case is normally only a few pages long so you can start and end a story relatively in a short time, very useful when you read the book in bits and parts.

Googling around you can see that the Author has had his fair share of accolades for the work done, and the book has some very good examples of the creative strategies used by the author to combat crime.

He used to roam on the streets as a vagabond homeless hanging around typical street corners, staying close to where the real action was. And this according to him was the most effective way to get information on what was happening on the crime scene, and do some real time espionage.

Another example of his creative skills was when a few areas are troubled by a spate of break-ins and burglaries. On investigation they found that the method used by the burglar/s was to climb on to vacant apartments on the 2nd and 3rd floors through the drainage pipes on the outside and enter the houses breaking windows. Most Melbournian houses generally do not have grilled windows / rods to prevent burglaries.

The complete police department is pissed off at this, but is unable to identify or catch the culprit. When Lalan's boss offers every one 1 week to vacation to catch this criminal. Lallan gets serious about this particular guy and starts working on this case, instead of other officers who work at night scrounging the streets looking for him. Lallan gets a ladder and works only at day time. 2 days later he leaves a message for the ambulance service to alert him whenever there are any emergency calls in a particular area.

True to his prediction there is an emergency call 2 nights later and the man admitted to the hospital is arrested by Lallan as the criminal, and all the stolen stuff so far is later recovered from his house. If you are wondering what was all this about, here is the clincher, When Lallan starts working on this case he is sure that it would be fairly impossible to catch this guy dressed in black in action in the darkness of the night. So he does what only someone like him could think of .

He buys 2 big can's of Vaseline and takes a big ladder, working in day time, single handedly goes around applying Vaseline to all the drainage pipes in the area. Then he waits for the thief to slip from one of his Vaseline'd pipes and call the ambulance, which is just what happened.

I hope you are convinced about the quality of the experiences he has mentioned about in this book by this example. I'm convinced it’s a good read.

Real Estate Mistakes :
Neil Jenman

Excellent book that I have referred to many others before. And not only me those whom I referred it to liked this as well. The book is fairly anti real estate agents and well as it should be, Real estate agents and lawyers are very few of those universally hated professions where mistrust and acrimony runs deep till the bone. And the author takes a good stab at both.

He describes the malpractices used by real estate agents in fairly good detail and suggests steps and ways for house sellers and buyers to avoid these mistakes that agents do. He has compiled an amazing list of statistics in which he convincingly argues his case against the agents, and of course the agents hate his book. For example one of the statistic he gives is that more than 80% of the people are so stressed out and disappointed by selling a house through their agents that they say they would never use the same agent again to sell a house.

For example according to the book, one of the biggest malpractices that agents use is selling houses by Auctions! Here again contrary to popular belief he argues that auctions are a harrowing experience for the buyer and seller alike. The only person who gains in these is the Agent. Which if you think of it is reasonably true. Also have a read through his very informative website and see a snippet of what he has to say.

A typical scenario described in the book goes like this, lets say you put up your house for sale and there are 2 buyers, Your agent's job should be to get you the maximum price that the buyers are willing to pay, but this is not actually what happens at the auctions. Lets say you decide to go for an auction and on auction day in the final moments you have 2 possible serious buyers who are bidding against each other.

Now consider this for a moment, every buyer when he has inspected the house has a certain set price in mind that is the maximum he might be willing to pay for the house. Lets say for the sake of the argument that the the two buyers have their maximum price 50,000 $ apart, meaning for your house the Buyer 1 is willing to pay 300,000 whereas buyer 2 is willing to pay 350,000.

This is what will happen on the Auction day, when the Bid reaches 300,000 , Buyer 1 will stop bidding and Buyer 2 will bid for 301,000 $ and buy the house. So that is effectively a waste of 49,000 $ for the seller. This he says is the biggest problem with the auctions. Now instead of an Auction , if the agent had negotiated individually and got their maximum buyer's price without revealing what other parties are willing to offer. The seller would not have lost such a big sum. Have a read in the author's own words here.

There is a caveat in this that the author comfortably ignores that at many times in Auctions , the heat of the competition encourages people to bid against each other and over shoot their budgets, and they end up paying more than what they would if they had thought with cool heads in the comforts of a negotiating table or on telephone.

The book is also gives some good tips on selection of good agents, tips on how not to advertise your house and stuff like that. He tells you the questions a buyer should ask, some basic checks to be performed, why not to do open inspections and stuff like that. In all I would say its a very good book and a must read for people planning to buy / sell their home. The book is definitely worth its ~ 20 $ price and if applied correctly can end up saving hundreds of dollars. If nothing else I am wiser for having read it , and perhaps better prepared for when I have to buy a house.

This is what a friend (who is about to buy a house) had to say after I had recommended this book " I just started reading it this morning and am already impressed. Its the sort of book I need to read at this point. Cheers for the recommendation."
You can perhaps guess how good the book is if some one is impressed in less than 1 or 2 hours.

The year of yes : the true story of a girl, a few hundred dates, and fate.
by Headley, Maria Dahvana

Now this is one of those books where a cute dumb blonde is unable to find love and hence goes sleeping around / dating with every moving thing in the town. Right from Cab drivers to tram drivers to homeless vagabonds to actors, writers, old retired men, Lesbians, Gays, and whatever other kinds there are.

The book is entertaining in a strange way that you get to see some one else's life standing from the sidelines. Though her sexual and other exploits are fairly adventurous, I wouldn't be tempted to go so far to get whatever freakish pleasure she got by dating around so many guys to find "TRUE LOVE". It gives a nice picture of the Big city night life (the book is set in New York), if you are interested in that sort of thing.

At times it just appears to weird to be true, and now I don't remember whether it was non fiction/ based on her real experiences or if it was just pure fiction. Either way the book is worth a read, it is indeed entertaining but falls somewhat short of the standard set by books like "Does my bum look big in this" which are of similar nature.

Towards the end after dating every possible candidate on New York city, when Maria finds her so called "true love" it is a divorcee, a Pulitzer prize winning writer whom she meets after a long Gap. Given that she devotes so many pages to other men, I would have preferred to know more about this final guy and whether it did actually work out for her with the writer, her so called "True Love". This detail is actually missing as the books ends on a note and maybe she wants us to assume like the endings in typical Bollywood movies... "They married and they lived happily ever after"

Overall, the book is entertaining and has decent humor in its pages, reading it in Public trains and buses, I have been stared at more than a couple of times having burst out laughing loudly while engrossed in it. But finally I wouldn't buy it, I buy only those books at full price which can be read over and over again, or which are of enduring value. IMHO, this book does not meet that criteria, its not worth buying, though it can definitely be read once. (For the uninitiated IMHO means "in my humble opinion")

In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson

This book was given to me by an American friend; I mention this because the book is not available in the said title outside America,
My friend said it’s a very good travelogue about Australia and anyone new to Australia should read it, so he read it and handed over to me to read it. I looked up Bill Bryson online and found that he was an American, Frankly speaking, I was a bit let down when I learnt that the author “Bill Bryson” was an American, In fact the last time I had seen his travelogues in the library I did not pick them. After all Americans in general aren't really known for their knowledge and appreciation of world culture and history. Have a look here to see what I mean. I have tried hard to get rid of my set prejudices about America, as none of the Americans I have met personally are the snobbish; I am better, richer and hence better than you types. Every American I have met personally has been polite, friendly and fairly knowledgeable about external affairs, but the stereotype still remains. I guess it’s just that the country as a whole that displays that rude image but individually the people are just as just as likeable as anywhere else.

Anyway now coming back to the book , I started this book with a strongly biased viewpoint and Bryson was initially living up to my expectations, of Americans being snobby , self centered, and indifferent to the rest of the world, have a read through his first chapter here and you will see why. He starts the book saying how he again forgot who Australia's prime minister was and telling us how little Australia matters to America and hence to the rest of the world. Saying that the Australian Economy is about equivalent to Illinois and that China grows its population by about 1 Australia every year. He gives statistics explaining the abysmally small number of articles about Australia that appeared in the American media in the past few years. And By taking the number of articles in newspapers as a benchmark for importance, he says Australia is about as important to Americans as Bananas but not nearly as important as Ice-cream. And Imagine reading all this in the first 2 pages with the prejudices I have, it was just getting enough for me to put the book down.

Well , luckily for me I did not put this book down then because he tries to highlight this as an issue to put things in perspective, to highlight where "Australia" stands in American minds as a subject. He exhorts the reader that things shouldn't be this way because he finds Australia a lot more interesting than what is currently projected outside. The next few pages are devoted purely to tell us why Australia is so much more interesting than the media would have us think. He mentions so many interesting facts about Australia that I doubt even a lot of Australians wouldn't know of. Say for example facts about the Australian Wild life , Did you know that, of the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world all the ten are native to Australia, There are has more things in the Australian wilderness that can kill you than any other place on the earth. 80% of all the wildlife that exists in Australia is so unique to itself that its not to be found anywhere else on the planet. Australia is a place so arid, so flat , so hot and so deserted that there is no other place on the planet except Antartica that is perhaps more forbidding to life, in spite of this, it has perhaps the largest inhabitation of yet to be discovered species of insects, animals and wildlife anywhere in the world because it is so huge that there are just not enough scientists / biologists around to cover it all. He made such an interesting case for Australia that I had shed all my initial inhibitions and in the first few pages was glued to the book.

From there on the book follows his journey across Australia, by train, car and on foot. Bill can be incredibly funny when he wants to be and there are so many moments where you can literally laugh your heart out on the incidents he narrates. He goes on describing his stay in Sydney , Melbourne, various other road trips and train ride on the INDIAN PACIFIC RAIL ROAD (Called so because it reaches out from the Indian ocean all the way to the Pacific ocean) running across Australia connecting Sydney on the east coast to Perth on the west coast across over 4000 kilometers, second only in length to the Trans Siberian railway.

The book has a lot of history about Australian Exploration starting with James Cook(the first western sailor to land on Australia in recent history, for the record he was a Lieutenant not a Captain when he discovered Australia), and then going on about other explorers who dared to go into the arid inland, he gives us detailed accounts of their experiences and what they found and faced in the Australian “Outback”. He writes about various other Australian adventurers like Kingford Smith and people and incidents in contemporary Australian history.

He covers all the major Australian cities, starting from Sydney, Canberra (ACT), Melbourne, Perth, Alice Springs, Darwin and many other smaller towns and paints an interesting picture of each of them. He also does long road trips across the outback and the coastal roads in Australia.

Frankly speaking I haven't read a better travelogue than this ever. Mind you this is not a book with lists of places to / see / eat / buy stuff. This book is about seeing Australia through Bill Bryson's eyes. Reading it is like experiencing the country for yourself and doing a short course on Australia with hard facts and detailed glimpses into Australian History, Geography, Botany and even some current affairs.

Then he tells us about the stolen generation and goes to depths devoting many pages to the cause of the Aboriginals and the injustice that was done to them in the past, the book has indeed a very poignant description of the atrocities done upon the Aboriginals. Since this is a shameful part of Australian History like the White Australia policy that you don’t read or hear a lot about it, so this makes it even more interesting.

Towards the end there is an Appendix with about 10 articles that Bill wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, while he was invited over to cover the Sydney Olympics in 2000. These few pages are like a bonus to an already very interesting book, and are good read by themselves.

The Book does not have any photos within its pages, only 2 pages of rough maps showing the route taken by the author. For me this is a big thing in itself as it’s the first travelogue book that I have read without even a single photo. It shows that the author doesn’t need the photos to lean on to help the reader visualize what he describes.

In all I have to agree with my friend who gave the book to me and said, "Any visitor to Australia MUST read this" and I AGREE!

Hats off to Bill Bryson.