There is a scene in Beverly Hills Cop where Axel Foley (played by Eddie Murphy) is following a lead with an art dealer.
Before he can speak to the woman he’s come to see, he must converse with the assistant dealer, a strong-accented chap called Serge.
During the exchange, one of Serge’s own assistants appears with a shirt open one button too many, revealing an overly hairy ‘80s chest.
Serge admonishes him, tells him to cover up, and then delivers one of the greatest lines in modern cinema:
“It’s not sexy; it’s animal.”
As the kids say, this scene lives in my head “rent free,” and I often recall it anew whenever someone utters the word “sexy” or, indeed, “animal.”
Given that the book my guest chose for this episode is called How to Be Animal, recalling the scene was inevitable.
That said, the book is really about humans, and how—whether Serge likes it or not—we all are, indeed, animals.
My guest for the episode is the rather brilliant Sally O’Reilly, and we had a thoroughly enjoyable and far-ranging chat live here in Sheffield, which I hope you enjoy.
Indeed, welcome to The Library of Lazy Thinking Podcast, with me, your host, Glenn Fisher.
As you may know by now, in each episode, I'm joined by a guest from the world of books and culture to talk about a specific book they'd like to put in the library.
There's no plan and no agenda, just two people lazily thinking about literature.
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In this episode, as I say, my very special guest is the writer, Sally O’Reilly, whose most recent book Hagtale is published in the UK by Scribe. We discuss her pick for the library, the 2007 non-fiction book How to Be Animal: What It Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger.
About Sally
Sally O’Reilly is a writer based in Sheffield. Her latest novel Hagtale: A Macbeth Origin Story(Scribe, 2025) is a dark fairy tale which retells Shakespeare’s play Macbeth from the perspective of a feral witch and a fourteenth-century monk who is attempting to find a document which records the Scottish king line. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picador US) draws on the life of Aemilia Lanyer, one of the first women to be published professionally in England and possibly the Dark Lady who inspired Shakespeare’s later sonnets. Dark Aemilia was nominated for the Kirkus Reviews Fiction prize in the US, and the Italian translation was shortlisted for the Premio Letteraria prize and was a Finalist for the Premio Vino del Terriccio award. Sally’s contemporary novels The Best Possible Taste and You Spin Me Round, are both published by Michael Joseph. Her non-fiction guide How To Be A Writer is published by Piatkus/Little, Brown.
About Melanie
Melanie began her career in the creative arts, working in classical music and literature. Her first poetry collection, Galatea, won the 2005 Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2007, she shifted her focus to intellectual history and humanity’s relationship with nature. That year, she received a Darwin Now Award for her research in the Canadian Arctic, followed by an International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. From 2007 to 2010, she was a Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. This research led to her first general trade nonfiction book, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature, published in 2011. The book was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best nonfiction books of 2012 and received the Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing. Most recently, she is the author of How to Be Animal: What it means to be human (2021) and the editor of Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-human Existence (2023) and Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World (2026).
Links to obscure (and not so obscure) things mentioned in this episode
* Order How to be Animal: What It Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger and Hagtail by Sally O’Reilly from my local independent bookshop in Sheffield here.
* Find out more about Sally here.
* You can watch the scene I reference from Beverly Hills Cop here.
* Find Glenn Fisher on Instagram here.
* Find The Library of Lazy Thinking on Instagram here.
About the Library
The Library of Lazy Thinking is a place to hang out and learn more about books. If you’d like to support the library and get access to everything here, you can become a paid member (and get an exclusive The Library of Lazy Thinking bookmark, sticker, and pin badge). All support goes back into the library, helping to organize live events, exclusive merchandise, and more podcasts.
About Glenn
Glenn Fisher is a writer—wait, Glenn Fisher is me. I’m the one writing this. Let’s drop the third-person act. My writing has been published in Lunate, The Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, 3am Magazine, Dogmatika, and Litro Magazine. I write about books and interview other writers and artists here in The Library of Lazy Thinking. I live in Sheffield and work as a freelance copywriter. I have had a best-selling non-fiction book published on the subject called The Art of the Click. It was published by Harriman House and shortlisted for Business Book of the Year. It has been translated into Simplified Chinese and Korean. I also have a dog called Pablo. He is harder to translate. Indeed, most of my life revolves around trying to understand his often unreasonable demands. Meanwhile, I am currently working on my first novel, The Invention of Memory, and on the eternal, soul-destroying journey of finding an agent.
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