Books like Hating Olivia — picked by fans

Although not from a working-class background himself, a young George Orwell set out to discover and report on the conditions of working-class lives in Paris and London during the early part of the 20th Century.

I love this book because, although written nearly a hundred years ago, it remains vitally resonant today. Orwell left the relative safety of middle-class suburbia and went on the road, working in Parisian restaurants as a dishwasher and joining the massed ranks of homeless tramps in the UK, even venturing down to Kent to join the ‘Hop-Pickers.’

This is a classic novel about working-class lives in America in the 1950s & 60s.

I love this book because the author, Charles Bukowski, somehow manages to make the mundane and often monotonous life of an American postal worker interesting to the reader. This is no mean feat, and to top this off, the novel is laugh-out-loud funny. There’s booze, women, sex, and hangovers, and also the dreaded Soup.

Buy a copy and find out for yourselves. 

I loved this book because it describes what life was like in the East End of London in the early Edwardian era.

Hailing from the East End of London myself, this first-hand account of the life of the poor particularly resonated, but it is a great read no matter what your background. A young Jack London wrote this first-hand account by living in the East End for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets.

The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.

If, like me, you come from a working-class background, you will love this book as much as I did.

The novel centres around working-class lives and football hooliganism, which was rife in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The Football Factory, set in the early 1990’s, is the first in a trilogy, and the narrative centres around the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink, and bad sex.

The book is as authentic and brutal as they come and a real page-turner. 

This is one of my favorite audiobooks ever, and the best romance I’ve ever listened to, and that’s unsurprising since Julia Whelan is my favorite audiobook narrator. When I learned she had written a romance about an audiobook narrator, I knew I had to listen to the audiobook she narrated herself. Julia did not disappoint as an author or a performer. I loved how this book presents a romance based both on strong attraction and a relationship that grows over time.

I was greatly entertained by glimpses into the audiobook industry, and I appreciated the nuances of a story about how we often have more control than we realize when it comes to the power our limitations have over us.

This book brings to light the intimate relationships of ordinary young men and women as opposed to those of powerful, public women. While royal women endured contemporary surveillance of their sexuality, pregnancies, and childbirths, the intimate lives of ordinary women must be wrested from archival records. Harwick’s exploration of legal records concerning unmarried pregnant women reveals the various range of strategies they adopted as well as the extensive support, both emotional and financial, they received from their community—clergy, lawyers, midwives, parents, etc.—to the benefit of both mother and child. Such support may well have reduced child abandonment and infanticide.

Hardwick not only challenges the standard notion of a sexual double standard applied to the detriment of women but also documents the mobilization of an early modern city not to punish unmarried women who faced expected pregnancies but to offer sympathetic aid.

In 1950s Sewanee, Chang and Katherine slowly fall in love and find that the Souths of Korea and Tennessee are not that different after all, both subject to lingering issues of class, family, race, and civil war. I love the poetic language in this novel, as well as its ambitious story and the complexity invested in every relation.

I had a great deal of respect for this author from reading her Psychology Today columns. Sophia Dembling is an introvert and from her research and personal experience knows that relationships between different personality types can be challenging to say the least. 

She takes us through all aspects of the dating process and doesn’t slam extroverts. What she does is show us, through her great wit and transparency, how we are not perfect but that we can balance each other. 

Dembling teaches introverts “how to let someone into their hearts while honoring the solitude we need..” I found myself laughing many times, even while reading the table of contents. “Whee! Fun With Extroverts” and “I Love you But Please Don’t Call Me.” And she helps extroverted readers understand and empathize with introverts who don’t find joy in too much socializing. 

During my schooling years, mathematics was my forte, though I hardly found it interesting. When I read the book, I felt that my pride was dwarfed by the beautiful writing on mathematics, about which I realized I had known almost nothing.

The writing endowed mathematics with a life full of various feelings, and enabled it to become ties of love, friendship, care, etc. which, in turn, changed people’s life for better. In a way, the book reshaped my view of the world.

I can’t talk Mythic Fiction without a shout-out to the man who penned the phrase. It’s beyond Urban Fantasy—mythic archetypes, mystery, magic, and toe-curling mayhem. When Celtic fiddler, Lizzie Mahone, gets stranded on a lonely country road at midnight, she has no idea how her life will change. Widdershins is a dark dip into the faerie realm that brings us face-to-face with freakish Bogans—nasty-pants faeries with sewer-mouths—faerie courts in shopping malls, and gripping psychological terror when Jilly Coppercorn gets trapped in a sinister world with her childhood abuser. Politics is rampant. At its core is the conflict between the settler fae and the Indigenous animal people. Behind it lurks love and hope.