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.

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.