He died with a Felafel in his hand
by John Birmingham

"Shared accommodation" The type of housing that you rent and take up when you are not married and move in to a new city as a student or take a new job. Shared accommodation is what this book is all about, or to put it differently it is about the craziest , wackiest , nerds that you would come across if you moved around cities living in shared accommodation.

I myself have been living in shared accommodation and in boys hostels for over 7 years now, but never before did I ever think that it can get as interesting or bizarre as described in this book. The book is full of crazy incidents describing John's experiences with flatmates moving around various cities in Australia.

There are times when you just can't stop laughing your ass off on his stories, in fact the title itself is in memory of a flatmate of his who died with a felafel in his hand, and guess what John and his other friends do when they learn of their flatmate's death? If you thought they would try to contact the poor guy's family and let them know the sad news, Think again. They rummage through his stuff looking for anything useful, and finding a few hundred dollars in cash stashed away, they add these as the poor guy's posthumous contribution to the room kitty.

Then there is another guy who stays in the room but refuses to pay the complete share of his rent as he has put a TENT in the living room and claims to be living in the tent. Yes, you heard that correctly. A guy who erects a tent in the room of the house and pays for only the floor space occupied by the tent. The book is about times when you would hold competitions to see who can go the most days without having a shower, or on who is wearing the dirtiest jeans, or when there is fungus growing between your toes as a result of not having a scrub in months.

Tent-dwelling bank clerks, albino moontanners, psycho fucking drama queens, acid eaters, mushroom farmers, brothel crawlers, hard-core separatist lesbians and obscurely tiger-throated Japanese girls are just some of the people you will come across in the book. Many of the times I felt the stories were just too weird to be true.

Overall this is a good book for a single read, I would give it a pass the second time. The book is also the root of a movie by the same name, click here for a good review of the movie.