Get Booked – Judymay Murphy, Embarking On The Classics 190922

Hello and welcome to another episode of Get Booked here on Women's and Men's radio station. I'm Hazel Butterfield and an absolutely huge book fan, whether it's reading them, talking about them, or even writing them. Today we have an excellent guest as ever in store for you, and I'm so excited to get going. But first, a quick reminder that if you have missed any of our shows in the past, you can pop on to womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked and on our SoundCloud. Now, what an absolute treat we have in store for you here today on Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station. We have the author, presenter coach, and all-round good egg, Judy May Murphy, joining us on the show. And since 2001, her 8 books have been published by major publishing houses in 28 countries and translated into many different languages. As well as being a regular on the worldwide speaker circuits, she's been known as the go-to expert for other coaches, authors, and speakers. And you can find out more at judymay.com. TV. Now, since lockdown, Judy May has embarked on a task of reading some of the literary classics, from Finnegan's Wake to Anna Karenina to The Magic Mountain and Crime and Punishment. There is just so many, the list is incredible, and I'm going to make sure it goes up on Twitter as well. There's just too many to read out right now. We're going to have a bit of a chat about the process, how much she did and didn't enjoy it, ones to recommend, those not so, how the list was devised because there's squillions out there, and what she has learned, and so much more. Judy May, thank you for joining us on the show. An absolute pleasure, Hazel. Good to hear you. Yeah, it's been a while, so I'm super excited to catch up with you, and what better place to do it than, uh, live on radio? Um, but we're talking about my favorite topic, readings, so 79 books since the start of lockdown, but to be honest, this is what you said last week, so I'm assuming the list has gone up since then. Yeah, well, the thing is that I, um, I usually read books, um, rather than finishing one and starting another, I'm normally reading about 10 at a time. So, um, but I— yeah, um, it's really interesting how, um, we think of it as a dutiful thing to do, that we start and we somehow get life points if we finish it, and if we finish it in a certain amount of time. And often we can't wait to talk about that on social media. But, um, I— what I really love is thinking of it not in terms of finishing a book, but living with a book. And so there are some books that I only intentionally read one page per day until it's done. And I've done that for years. That wasn't something I started with lockdown. So I read things and reread things like James Joyce's Ulysses, just one page at a time, frankly, because anything else overwhelmed me usually. And then sometimes, you know, if you felt like it, you could extend it to 5 or even 10 pages. But right now, like with Finnegan's Wake, I can't handle more than a page a day. So that's what I do. And I know that it'll take me another year until it's finished. And that's okay because I don't think of it as I won't have finished Finnegan's Wake for a year. I think of it as another year of living with Finnegan's Wake. See, this— I think I find that incredible because I think there are a lot of people out there that would like to embark on reading a classic, but it can be quite hard going. So I think this is a fantastic way of doing it. And I must say, I think, you know, a lot of my friends go, oh, Hazel's always reading 3 books at a time. But oh no, you do 10. You've completely beaten me to it. And I just, I love it that you do things, you've found a different way of doing it because I suppose there's so much, there's some incredible books out there, but the classics, I guess a lot of people are scared to do because they hear that, you know, 10,000 pages. And I mean, what's up with Karolina? That's a long one, right? It is. Yeah, a lot of the Russian stuff is very, very long. I guess the long winters we can blame for that, but also very worthwhile. And the thing is that usually we talk about the difficult ones as if somehow that makes us better. I want to be really clear, reading the classics doesn't make you a superior person. It just means you get to enjoy stuff that over time has been proven to be worthwhile. And also, it usually stands for a certain period in history. It's normally a seminal work in that, you know, it spoke to the zeitgeist. It spoke to the voice of the time, what everybody was going through. This person expressed it. And it could be something that's a very lovely, simple book like The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Really, really lovely book, you know, coming out of the Second World War. A lot of Americans still in Europe. Like, all of those things came together with people saying, "Ah, yes, that's what's going on." And it was the same thing then with something like Anna Karenina, like, the, you know, there was great upheaval, and a lot of the upheaval wasn't just political, but it was also, you know, people questioning the church, people questioning their morals, people questioning, you know, what was going on in the world. And so this is what I love about it is that it can really reassure us about now. It's like, you know, upheaval is okay. Upheaval is good. It's making room for the new so that we can actually sleep at night and not wake up feeling freaked out about, you know, our world is falling apart. No, it's just changing. And I think the classics reassure us with that. They do, but rather— there are many reasons to read classical literature, but paradoxically, a lot of classic literature is it reminds us actually that history repeats itself. I mean, you know, I mean, there's so much that, say, Oscar Wilde wrote about that is so incredibly modern, but just with a classical prose. And there's so much where, um, you know, we think, especially, especially the youth of today, they think that they've created certain elements of life that we're living through at the moment. But yet if you read classics, sometimes it just helps us to understand actually that maybe it's not all different, we're not all living in times that are incredibly scary. This is what's happened 200, 300 years ago as well, and life does go on. And so sometimes I just think it helps us broaden our horizon and kind of help us look at how we've learned from the past, but also how the past does actually repeat itself. Yeah, completely. And also it gives us indications for the voice that we can use and the way that we can bring up different subjects, things that are important to us. And so You mentioned Oscar Wilde. We look at The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the poem he wrote while he was in jail for having homosexual relations, as it might have been put back then, and him, you know, showing that, you know, this is a person who, you know, not just him but others, you know, going through this really, really awful situation and turning it into art so that we want to look at it, so that we can't turn away quite so quickly. And then it just lets us know that it does work to have a voice, to, to write something down, that we're not as silent and unseen as we often feel ourselves to be. Yeah, look how far we've progressed. I mean, sometimes we do progress and sometimes we don't, but sometimes reading the classics helps us realize, wow, that is what it was like for people years ago. Don't complain that we're not making any progress. We are. Um, I just— and don't take for granted all the, you know, the great work that has been done and the people that came before us who did that great work. Even reading something like, you know, so I didn't just read the big— I read a lot of the big ones, as it were, but I also, over the 2 and a half years, I read a lot of ones that I was like, I just can't believe I haven't read this yet. Things like a lot of Jack Kerouac. Very early on in the process, I thought, I've got to reread On the Road because I just need a road trip right now. I've been indoors for weeks. I need a road trip. And then after After that, I ended up reading, you know, Dharma Bums, Visions of Cody, Big Sur, The Subterraneans. I'm currently reading Dr. Sax, which is my absolute favorite of Kerouac's. And but just knowing that it doesn't also— it doesn't have to be really, really big and heavy, that it can actually be kind of fun. Like, it's— you sit with a Kerouac book, and it's kind of like hanging out with your drunk buddies doing crazy things, but you won't actually die on the road. And then also reading things like The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. Oh. And realizing just how— it's just very beautiful little book. It's just— it's self-contained. Again, very much of its time. You know, you can really feel what it's like to be a young woman who's interested in fashion and men and making friends and doing something in the world. And then it all goes wrong. And so many people can just relate to that. So I think— Sometimes some of the books that are— that we're encouraged into when we're younger are books that really don't speak to us initially. So if someone is saying, "Okay, I don't normally read classic literature, where will I start?" I would say start with something that isn't an epic tone that won't take you forever, but also something that you're interested in already. It could be something like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You know, a lot of people are like, well, I know already that I just love the magic of that, and I'm already familiar with some of the characters from our modern culture. So, um, you know, I know that I'm going to enjoy that. Um, and also there's been— there have been books over the last 2 and a half years that I've kind of given up on. Now, um, they were, um— I gave up on them really because, um, I, I just wasn't relating within the first, um, in the first chapter. And you know what, I can't even tell you what they were. I've so moved my head on from it. But you know, don't you, within the first couple of chapters— that's me. If I get past the first two chapters, that's it, I'm invested. Yeah. And for me, it doesn't always have to be that I'm absolutely loving it, but I have to know that I'm getting something from it. So yeah, that there's— but then having said that, there are books that I completely I just wish I had that time back. And some of them are very famous, like Mikhail Bulgakov. I don't quite know if I'm pronouncing that right. His The Master and Margarita. Now, I know a lot about that period of time, Stalinist part of history in Russia, what it was like. I first went to Russia in 1990. I've taught myself to speak Russian just using 3 minutes a day in order that I can listen to things like Joseph Brodsky in his original language and Pushkin fin, of course. But, um, so, so it wasn't that I wasn't madly interested in reading this book, The Master and Margarita, but then once I was in it, I just found it so infantile and childish and so self-absorbed that I— it's kind of like when you go to a party and you, you sit beside someone who just monologues the whole time, and you're just kind of like, you're having more fun than I am here. And at the end of the book, I— that was the feeling that I had. And I know that that's wildly unpopular. There's people who say it's one of the top 5 books ever. You don't have to like something just because The Guardian is telling you that it's one of the 100 books that you have to read before you die. Well, that's the beauty of being an individual. Not all of us like— can you imagine if we all liked the same thing? That would just be dull, wouldn't it? Unless it was everyone liking the same stuff as me, then that would be a nice break. No, yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Absolutely. Absolutely. And actually, you know, we were speaking about how do you choose things. So one of the things I did was I went to that list that was made years ago and just looked at like, okay, these are the 100 books that they're saying are really, really worthwhile. And then picking out, well, which ones do I really feel like, oh yeah, I can't believe I haven't read that yet. We mentioned Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, also things like John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Oh, I love that. I reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm not sure if that was actually on that list, but things like Max Beerbaum's Zuleika Dobson. I never would have read that. Again, I wish that he hadn't, you know, created such a frothy, silly concept for what was surrounded by incredible literature, like his way with words, his way with an idea is phenomenal. But for me, the concept was just too thin. So didn't love it. Very glad I read it. Probably the book that I enjoyed the most, one of the books I enjoyed the most was Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. And that surprised me. And I think it's kind of like, again, going to a party and you think you're not gonna enjoy yourself or meeting someone and thinking, oh, this person looks a bit dull. I'll just do 5 minutes and move on. On. But in fact, with Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, I was transported. It's now one of my top 5 favorite books. I just adored it. And this is the great thing. It's an adventure. It's a conversation with some of the best minds that have ever existed. And why would you not put time into that? And so, when I'm deciding what the next thing is, I really go on excitement. What am I excited to read? But that excitement comes from different angles. Sometimes it's, I'm excited to read it because it's Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. How would that not be a trip, literally? You know, and then sometimes it's like, I'm, you know, with Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, I was excited to read it because I'd been promising myself the last 30 years that I was going to read it and hadn't got around to it. So, you know, just go on excitement. Just use the energy of that would be good. Like whether it's classic literature or something that you've heard about that just came out, you know, if it's a summer read, if it's— I went through a phase about 15 years ago of rereading Famous Five novels. I bought the entire collection of Famous Fives and read and reread most of them and had the best time. So really just go with what excites you because because that's the energy and you've, you've chosen it, so you're going to be paying attention. I used to read Enid Blyton novels so incredibly quickly, and my mum was skint. We were, you know, we were poor as a family, and I'd finish a book and she'd go, but I can't afford the next one, can you at least let it last longer than a day? I'm like, but I don't want to put it down. Oh, it's just, um, I mean, I do absolutely love reading, but I must say I don't read enough classics. And ridiculously, whenever I do, I sit there and just go, "Oh my God, I enjoy this so much." And quite often, and there are euphemisms for kind of modern-day life as well. And, you know, so I was so excited, I'm so ridiculously excited to chat to you to kind of figure out which ones I should read. And I know that the top 3 that you suggest, I'm definitely gonna read. And if there are people listening right now that are saying, "Right, the idea of reading some of these books is a little bit daunting, you can do it on Audible. You can, and just as you're walking around, which is so much easier. But also, you know, Audible can be a bit expensive for some people. You pop onto YouTube and somebody's reading them for you. And oh yeah, absolutely. And also, here's another handy-dandy tip, um, LibriVox. Have a really great app now, and at the moment I always have an audio going for like when I'm walking to the tube or— Yeah, me too. —waiting somewhere, and currently I'm rereading Moby Dick because I actually gave up on it halfway through. I was in my 20s, and it's the only book I ever gave up on, and I'm like, "Judy May, you don't give up," and back I went. But it's absolutely free, and you can get A lot of the classics, you know, the stuff that's outside of copyright, so things like Frankenstein was the one I listened to before that. There's just— and there's really— there's different versions, so you'll often have different readers. So if the reader's voice grates you or you feel they're not quite talented at that yet, you know, shop around a little bit. As you say, you know, go to YouTube, have a look at that. And, you know, if you're not able to get to your public library, Also look at gutenberg.org, Gutenberg as in the printing press, dot org, and they have like everything that's out of copyright, almost everything, certainly all the classics. And so you can, you know, get those downloaded and read those for free. Oh, for people who actually still own a CD player, the library have a lot of books on CD. And the library is free. If we do not use this service, they're going to find a reason to get rid of it. So, you know, we have a fantastic library system in the UK, so, and, and completely and utterly free. Um, but I do actually have an Audible subscription because, um, I do, as I said, I read about 3 books at a time. I've always got one on Audible. At the moment it's Jimmy Carr's Before and After because lovely. I just like to be that person walking down the street or at the gym that giggling to herself or in complete hysterics. Uh, um, but I tend to do autobiographies on Audible because more often than not the actual author will be reading it, and it just gives it that different edge that I just find intoxicating. Um, I read a lot of books obviously for this show as well, and I normally have a physical book and I have something that is on Kindle or a proof copy that's come through electronically. So there's always at least 3 going. But I mean, like yourself, sometimes I just, I don't want to race through just so I tell people how quickly I can supposedly read it. Do you not find it heartbreaking sometimes when you're coming to an end of a book and you just want to prolong it as long as possible? Oh, absolutely. You feel like you're kind of slowly backing out the door of like the best, you know, holiday stay ever. Why don't we come back? With the best people you've ever met. Oh yeah. But remember, you can always and, you know, a couple of years later you'll have forgotten a lot of the detail. And so you can go back like with movies and it's as if you're watching it for the first time. But I think as well that we've got to remember that we're used to doing things quite passively these days. We're used to getting our reward passively. So it's just kind of fed to us and we just got to sit there and receive, receive, receive. We were losing the knack of getting our reward actively. So, you know, putting in some effort and getting some reward back. We saw a little bit during when lockdown started and people were talking about making their own sourdough bread. And it was effort. And you could feel people, you know, putting in the effort to get this sourdough starter going. I didn't do this, but I know lots of people did. And they, you know, they were really talking about how much they enjoyed it because they had done it. They had put in effort. And I think with reading in general, It helps us to remember that for every aspect of our lives, that, you know, it doesn't have to be easy. In fact, if we put effort in, then we don't just feel the reward of distraction. We don't just feel the reward of, you know, listening to things that sound wonderful. We also feel proud. We also feel ourselves growing stronger. In my profession, as you were saying, my day job is I'm an international motivational speaker.. And it used to be that back in the early 2000s, many of my colleagues were teaching people to speed read, and I never, never got it. I never— why would you want to? Why? Like, for me, it's about, you know, reading slowly, really take your time so that you can allow yourself to, you know, let's imagine that you're something as simple as you're reading the description of a home that someone walks into for the first time.. And then you start thinking about your own home and how, oh, I can put that there. Or if somebody is having an argument and you think, oh my gosh, that's like this person that I feel very difficult. Imagine if I said this back to them, what would the reaction be? And you're really integrating the book into your experience. You're not just skating over it, you know, in order that you can say that you read it or in order that you can, you know, maybe learn something. But remember that, you know, it's yours. Just take it, go deep with it. It's like if you're eating a meal and I met, you know, one of my colleagues, he stated, because we all eat ridiculously healthily, and he, but he made the statement that he doesn't even care how it tastes because he just wants, he just thinks of food as fuel. And I remember thinking, wow, I just, why would you, why would you not, you're alive, why would you not be fully alive? Why would you not be adding adding, you know, pomegranate seeds to the top of your salad and toasting the pumpkin seeds and, you know, tasting how that is different and, you know, integrating the experience and experiencing. A visual treat as well as, you know, a tasty treat. It's just all-encompassing. We just can keep on just passing, letting life pass us by and not properly taking in what we're experiencing. It's ridiculous. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and again, another great thing with the classics is that it does bring you into very, very different worlds, which can help you to appreciate different parts of your own world. So for example, um, one of the books I read was John McGarran's Amongst Women. And, um, as, as an Irish woman, I found it very, very difficult, very oppressive. Um, but the thing that I loved was about the, um, the way they would go into the fields and they would work the fields and that connection with the land. And then the next time I just found myself wandering around Holland Park, it was like a different park because I really was aware of the ground. I was really aware of the plants and the trees in a way that I hadn't been before I read that. So, yeah, it's, you know, it's not a thing that's separate from your life. We love it. Many of us who are readers, we became readers because you know, we had difficult circumstances to escape from. Maybe it was poverty, maybe it was neglect, maybe it was violence, maybe it was just a world that wasn't working for you. But we've got to remember that, in fact, as well as escaping from the world, we can use it to enrich the world that we now have the power to build for ourselves. And, you know, strangely, reading something like— I read quite a lot of Dostoevsky over the last 2 and a half years. And with them, things like Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, um, just having this whole different level of appreciation for, you know, the, the fact that I wasn't freezing, the fact that I didn't just have one outfit, the fact that, um, you know, that, that we are surrounded by so much. Like, you know, I, I really, really loved that. By the way, Crime and Punishment was the one that kicked the whole shebang off because we thought initially that the first lockdown was going to be about 6 weeks. And so, I decided I was going to make it mean something. That's what I'm always doing my day and with, you know, any time period, make it mean something. So, I said to a friend, "Hey, why don't we read Crime and Punishment?" There's no place in my life usually that I would be able to fit that in, but I have all this extra time now. I'm not out and about doing stuff. And my friend agreed that that's what we were going to do. We're going to read Crime and Punishment. Here's something interesting. She still hasn't finished it. No, she still hasn't read it. And the difference is this, that I decided I was going to touch it daily. I've got a friend who's a stunt performer and she has this phrase, touch it daily, and I just love it. And she says whenever she's committed to something, she just visits it every single day. She calls it touch it daily. And that is, you know, rereading some plan she's written, making one phone call, sending one email. But that's what I decided with Crime and Punishment, that every day I'm going to just read one page. And I'd already been doing that with, with several other books. So I said, right, for, for that, that, that's it. And then ended up reading it a bit more because I'd kind of get into it. Whereas the difference was my friend said, oh, I'm really tired. I don't really want to read right now. Again, so she left it till the evening. I do my reading in the morning. You know, whatever you want to prioritize, whatever you want to make happen, do it before noon. If it's a must, get it done before noon. Like we're speaking before noon. This is, this is really great because it's like we want to make sure we're super energized and that we're not just giving it leftover energy. But she said to herself, well, I will, you know, I'll do it on the weekend. I'll catch up on the weekend. For a start, you don't want to feel like you're catching up, that you're behind, because you're not. That feels like it's something you've got to do, like you've got to empty the washing machine, you need to make sure that you spring clean. That straight away, that's the way that we use language to sometimes not make something that, you know, she's making it sound a lot more like a task that she has to do rather than something she should be excited about being involved with. So yeah, we've got to be cautious about how we assign things to ourselves. Completely, completely. And, um, also another thing that I think is really important when it comes to reading the classics is asking yourself, what, what do I believe this will give me? What will this gift me? Um, you know, will it— and, you know, bragging rights, if you want bragging rights. Yeah. Um, but by about a quarter of the way through The Magic Mountain, I was like, damn it, I'm finishing this thing and I'm telling everyone, telling everyone I have read The The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. That I found tricky because it was so modernist and it had such a binary way of discussing everything, good and evil, progression and tradition, and that high modernist way, I guess it was, you know, one of the last great modernist novels. You know, I found that very, very difficult because we're all so terribly nuanced these days. But, you know, it was just pure tenacity got me to the end. But then one of the latest ones that I finished, Joan Didion's play As It Lays, that was just me feeling like, yeah, you know what, if I'd been a bit cooler, if I'd been a bit more reckless, if I hadn't been, um, you know, so completely caring about everybody's experience on the planet, I could have been her, you know. I could have been, um, you know, drinking Coke for breakfast and, um, you know, hanging out daily with Warren Beatty and all these guys. And I could, I could have lived that life that she wrote about in Play It As It Lays. I could have been— A song from The Waves. Very cool book. So I read that, and again, here's another thing: if you get into something, go with it. Like, I only listed it as one book, which is unfair to the author, but I read like a whole bunch of Jack Reachers. So normally when I finished, you know, one more difficult classical book, if you like, I would then just read a Jack Reacher as a kind of a palate cleanser. Oh yeah, yeah. But, you know, that was easy to get into that. And same again with Jack Kerouac, you know, ended up doing 5 in a row on that. Yeah, I see that on the list. Yeah, with Joan Didion, um, you know, started off with Slouching Toward Bethlehem, an incredible set of essays, and then was interested in her thought process and the way she, um, the way she reported the time she was living in. Um, I got so into that that I read The White Album And then just got so into her and how cool she was that I ended up reading Play It As It Lays. So again, you know, just take those little rabbit holes, go down them, enjoy it. Same thing for Raymond Chandler. I read The Long Goodbye and then ended up reading The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake. And just not saying, oh, I really should just, you know, make sure I've read— I used to do this where it was like, I'll read at least one at least one thing by George Eliot, I'll read at least one thing by Thomas Hardy, and, you know, I want to read at least one thing by each great author. But then that's quite constrictive, you know. This is supposed to be for your pleasure. You've got to just let it flow how it, you know, sometimes something that you thought would work doesn't, and sometimes things that you didn't think would work, you just, they just run away with you, and you you just fall in love and you want to keep on going. Hence why, you know, your list, you have names that are repeated. Um, I did actually just Google Crime and Punishment on YouTube and it's a— it's just shy of 22 hours and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do the YouTube version of Crime and Punishment. Oh right, here's, here's another great trick. If, if your ear can take it, speed it up on YouTube. A lot of people don't know that on YouTube you can actually— and, and on, um, Libri that great free app, you can speed it up a little bit. So according to the different speaker, sometimes I would speed it up as much as, you know, have it like 1.5 rather than 1, is like the rate they're speaking at. But sometimes I could, you know, crank it up to 1.5 very, very comfortably. And the, you know, the one I'm listening to at the moment, Moby Dick, I have it on 1.3. At the moment. So, you know, realise that you can actually turn that 22 hours into like 19. I love that idea. And the thing is though, quite often I do have my friends and family saying, "Oh Hazel, you speak so quickly sometimes," and I'm just worried that if I speed it up I'll be like, "Good night everybody, come on, let's go." So I've got to be careful speeding it up and how much it might make me me speed up a little bit more. What I do find quite interesting is you started to read all these books in lockdown, and a lot of people really got into reading in lockdown because they suddenly had this time to get things done. But also books, they can take you to places that you can't always physically go to, and we wanted to connect with people. And there's a lot of books out there that help us understand each other more, and they're not necessarily self-help. Some of them are fiction, but they're based on either the author's real life or something that they've witnessed or seen or experienced that they just want to kind of put in a more palatable way. And we do want to— we want to know each other, we want to connect with each other. And I think that's why reading really did skyrocket in lockdown. But there are still— there were still a lot of people just think, I just don't have time to read. But yet there are so many people where a new series of something comes out on Netflix and that 11 hours is completely done in a day and a half, right? Because they know that they're going to get a reward from it. And so that's why I'd say just, you know, just read a few pages of a book and then you'll start to know that, oh, this is for me. A book that I— probably the best and the most surprising book that I read in this, that whole time, and I'm carrying it on a little bit less now because I'm actually going out doing things at night, but it was Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. It's a modern classic. It is just the most extraordinary book. Number 40. You know, that's it on my— yes, number 41, I think, maybe. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is just— it's so brilliant because it's so understated. Created, the, you know, the scene that it's set in, the characters themselves. But as you were saying, this is how we learn about ourselves. And, you know, as I was reading it, I was like, A, I wanted to tidy up a lot more. I was like, okay, let's not risk going to where these characters are kind of drifting toward. And B, just, wow, that's the nature of it, that if I didn't have all of these different modern ways of living to support me, I think I would have ended up exactly like that character. And they're okay. Like, just this idea of that life doesn't have to be exactly the way that, you know, many of my colleagues will get on stage and they're saying, you know, you know, you're gonna earn a million, you're gonna have the sports car, you're gonna have the— and I'm the one that then gets up and says, um, you know what, maybe that's not for you. Maybe for you what you want is to buy— like, I, I I spend a lot of my money buying time, time to read, time to write, time to explore the world. And so I think that we're getting rid of this idea that, you know, the big house in the suburbs with, you know, X amount of kids, if you don't want kids, like that just doesn't have to be right for you. Like you, I've seen you with your kids and it's just adorable. I've got to say, Hazel, it's just inspiring to watch the way that you relate to them. Absolutely inspiring. And for me, kids would be a disaster. I just, I wouldn't be able to handle any of it. I helped to raise my two youngest siblings. I feel like, right, that's me done. And so I felt a lot of guilt and difficulty for so many years around the fact that I wasn't, I hadn't painted myself into that picture, which was the way success was supposed to be like. But then you read something like Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and my favorite character in that ended up not getting married and having kids. And, and just this very simple idea of, and it's okay, it's okay to change your mind, it's okay to, to do things differently, it's okay to, to fail and get back up again, it's okay, it's okay. And, and I think that because for the, um, for about a decade in the early 2000s, my My book diet was pretty much exclusively self-help books, and there was a great benefit from that. But I feel that when you can then, you know, read great literature, it kind of makes that more real because it's human nature and you do see different characters doing quite self-helpy things 200 years ago, but it just wasn't called that back then, you know. One of the greatest books I've read over the last 2 and a half years when it comes to just, you know, getting up and making the most of it and getting on with it is James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. I really don't understand why, you know, why every child isn't handed that book when they're 14 years old. I mean, I really— it's quite easy to read. And really, really worthwhile. And I remember feeling quite angry at myself and kind of at the world after I'd read it because I thought, you know, why? Why was I not given this earlier? Why wasn't I given this? And why, why, you know, why didn't I realize just how white my reading was? That was another aspect. Another thing that I learned is that, you know, you look through my list and it's like, wow, there's a lot of old white people people here, right? And that is something that I am, you know, that I'm fixing now. I mean, it's great to read Hunter S. Thompson. It's not that we have to ignore that, but it's just like there are so many people who we're not reading. Like, I can't believe I'd never read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Like, I mean, start from that. And, you know, lots of other things. I thought that because I was a fan of Maya Angelou, that somehow my reading wasn't racist. And now that I see that, oh, it was. Yeah, accidentally. So accidentally, yeah, we've got to get conscious around that. As you know, no matter, you know, what race you're from, you've got to get conscious around, um, you know, who are you reading? Because when you're reading one person, you're ignoring another person that is very, very worthy of your time. It is unintentional, but yeah, um, unfortunately a lot of of course the classics were written predominantly by old white men, but this is why it's good to, you know, you, you in to mingle, you know, you have the classics, you go to something modern, make conscious decisions about what you're absorbing. So one of my main questions to you was, because I've said I'm definitely going to read at least 3 of these classics, and straight away I already have great big stars against James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Ford Madox Ford Madox's The Good Soldier, and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. Now, but what would you say I should read if I was to pick 3? I would— I really would love everyone to start reading James Baldwin. So I would definitely say Go Tell It on the Mountain, or anything. Anything that catches your eye by James Baldwin. And a way that you might like to get into it would be watching interviews of him on YouTube and having a look at, you know, what is it that he stood for, who was he as a person. You're just going to fall madly in love with him as a person, and then you'll want to read everything by him. I know that certainly by next summer, that's part of my plan, is to have read everything by James Baldwin. The next thing And I would suggest read something that you think you won't be able to. So, uh, you think, um, I'm not the kind of person that could do that, you know. So for me right now, I'm learning how to ice skate because in my mind I'm not the kind of person. So for me, you know, it's kind of like blonde cheerleader types who grew up completely able-bodied, who were, you know, on the basketball team, like those types. Are the ones that do, um, that, that ice skate. And so I thought it was completely beyond me, and the first few lessons I was proving myself correct, but then I got into it. So that's what I would suggest is take a book that you say to yourself, when I've read this, I know that I can, I can handle anything. The first book that I ever read in that way was a teacher handed me, um, Jane Eyre when I was 12 years and she said something like, you know, "I would not recommend this to most of the class, but I think you will be able for it." So the fact that I was chosen as special, you know, I led a childhood where I did not get a lot of attention, certainly not positive attention. And so someone saying, "I see you and I think you can do this," that spurred me on. And it took me about 3 months to read it the first time. I read it—brilliant teacher—I have read it through about— I have read it about up 5 times at this stage now. I just love it. Um, but that, that first time, that was the thing that, um, that really got me, um, believing that I could read anything. So if there's something that you think you can't, I love the phrase, you know, if you can't, then you must. So, um, yeah, definitely. So, um, um, another thing then I would say is You know, ask people what they think because you can feel more connected to somebody when you know that it's a book that they loved. So I'm friends with the producer William Orbit, and he suggested The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, and I wouldn't have read that. I would have thought of that as just, you know, way down the line for things that were interesting. But I, you know, we have great chats. He's phenomenally interesting. Oh, if he finds it interesting, I'm going to get something from it.. So, yeah, I would say, you know, ask somebody. Another thing I did was I, on social media, I just put a request out like anybody got any suggestions for things to read. And, and this woman who's part of the— I think it's pronounced the Bruderhof. They're a highly Christian sect and they sort of live separately, kind of like the Amish do. But they, they still, you know, they, they have phones. Phones and they use electronics and things, but they live in a very communal way, very Christian way, attached to the land, lots of kids. So I wouldn't have thought that I had a huge amount in common with this woman. So I was fascinated when she recommended a Dick— what's the name of the guy? It's just escaped me now. I want to say Dick Tracy, but that's the detective. It'll come back. Dick Francis? Dick Francis. Thank you. So Dick Francis was— he was a jockey originally, and then he went on to write all these really great books about that world. And I was just amazed that, you know, she was recommending something from the 1970s from someone who was very popular. You know, what is that about? And I was just kind of intrigued by this suggestion. So I read one. I think maybe the first one I read was Whip Hand. And it was so well written. And I had this kind of snobbery thinking, well, if he came from the horse riding world, you know, maybe he didn't even write them himself. Of course he did. His wife also helped. And I was— it was just extraordinary. Same with Jack Reacher, the Jack Reacher books. Like, you know, sometimes we think if something's popular, it isn't well written, but you start to discern, like, wow, these are also phenomenally well written. And I ended up reading about 3 of those. Isn't it great that people can surprise you though? I mean, there's, there's boxers out there that write incredible poetry. There's ridiculously slapstick comedians, you know, the likes of Jim Carrey, who do incredible speeches on just on self-worth. There are, you know, people can surprise us and just never ever put anybody in a box. It's, it's a really good reminder, isn't it? Absolutely. So, so those would be my 3 suggestions. Sorry, they're not too specific as you might like, but James Baldwin is the most specific suggestion. Anything by James Baldwin, then, um, something that you think you can't, and then something that somebody you admire or somebody who fascinates you suggests that you read. Well, my top 3 is now top 5, uh, and I just can't wait to do it. But the one that I'm going to do, which I'm surprised about is I am going to do Crime and Punishment. I haven't read it, and I'm definitely going to do it. I'm going to do it on, on YouTube, and I might speed it up a little bit and just, just, just see whether my tempo gets affected. Oh, and here's another tip, right? So if something is, is just going on endlessly, like with The Magic Mountain, the last 10% of Magic Mountain I did over one day, um, on audio just because I knew that it would take me another 2 weeks if I was doing it reading it, and I was just ready for it to be done. So remember that you don't have to just choose one mode and stick to it because it does feel different. You know, sometimes if I'm listening to Moby Dick and something really, really captures me, and there are, you know, whole chapters where I'm just like, okay, that was just pure magic, then I go in and I look at the Kindle version and I really, really soak it in. So you don't have to just do one or another, and because sometimes there's bits of books that are tricky, like in Moby Dick, there's bits where he just, like, describes every kind of whale. You might want to do that as audio. So, you know, just make it easy for yourself. There's no prizes for making life difficult. No, and you just, you know, just because you choose to start a particular way, you can— nothing's written in stone apart from the commandments, but they were ages ago, and People ignore those now. We just do it our way. Because it used to be that we were told, you know, that you had to read even sitting in a certain position. You had to read with your back straight and holding the book at a certain angle, these very Victorian ways of doing it. So, yeah, I just— I think it's fascinating. Another book that I'd love to just mention, because it's one that a lot of people are scared of, and it's Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. Now, this isn't the modern writer Tom Wolfe. This is Thomas Wolfe. And I think there was a movie starring Jude Law made about this author. I haven't seen it. But Look Homeward, Angel was just really, really extraordinary. Sometimes, you know, we are scared of the longer ones, but when you find a longer book that is actually keeping your attention and isn't too tricky and you're not having to work hard, it's not your version of The Magic Mountain, when you find something like I found in Look Homeward, Angel, it's kind of like having, you know, you can't wait on Netflix, you can't wait for the next series to come out. It's that sort of feeling that you just love the fact that it's not coming to an end anytime soon. And that's a book I would love people to start to revisit. The thing is, a fantastic 500-page book is going to be read a lot swiftly, and a lot easier than, say, a 20-page rubbish book, because you just aren't going to want to do it. And the thing is, when you were saying before that we were all told that we had to read in a particular way, and, you know, archaic ways that have kind of put people off from reading now, I remember in lockdown when— do you know when we had to queue up outside supermarkets? For hours on end and everybody found it really daunting. I remember this lady coming up to me, I was right near the front of the queue, and she said, "Oh, how long have you been queuing for? I just want to know whether it's worth getting in the queue or come back later." And I just went, "Oh honey, I have no idea." And I just kind of held the amount of pages I'd read and went, "About that long." I love it. I love it. I'm the same way when people talk about going on long-distance flights because they'll be saying, okay, well, I'm going to watch this movie and then I got these snacks and I'm going to do these Sudoku puzzles and I'm going to do this. But when I was doing book tours in America, sort of in the early 2000s, I read all of the Harry Potter books just on flights and in airports. And so now that's what I think of a flight being. I think of it as being a book. It's not wasted time. So I'm flying to New York and back. It's like, oh, what book is that? So, you know, it really is a wonderful way of doing it. And I know a lot of people are now using different series and different movies to do that. But I'd love to encourage you that, you know, ask yourself this question: What would you like to be made of? Because there's a lot of really, really great ones that I understand from people are really amazing series. Breaking Bad, um, like Better Call Saul, like, um, Downton Abbey, um, like Game of Thrones. I have not seen any of those. I haven't seen not a one of them, um, not even like 5 minutes of them. And, um, and I don't know how to cook math. I know, I don't know, I don't know how to do— and I get it, but we do have to prioritize and we have to, you know, So someone said to me about a book that came out and they said, "I loved it. I really, really loved it. You have to read it." And they got a little bit pushy about it. And so I said to them, "Okay, well, this is what I'm planning to read next. Why do you believe that this book is better than this?" And they said, "Oh, well, you can read them both." But the thing is that we do have only a certain amount of time on the planet and we don't want to just be reading. We want to be writing. We want to be educating. We want to be adventuring. We want to be loving people. We want to be dancing. We want to be ice skating badly. There's all these things that we want to do. And so we do need to prioritize. And that is why I really love the classics, is because I know that there's something good enough in there that is going to be worth my while. And I get excited finding out, well, what is that? And sometimes I stay a little bit longer with something because I'm just trusting that something good is coming. So, you know, with several of the books that I read, like some of them were immediate. Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, I was in. I was like, adventure, we're on the road, trouble already. Let's go, right? Oh, there's going to be a boat. Brilliant, right? So I was already just absolutely captivated by that. Same thing for Donna Tartt. Charlotte's Secret History, the moment I knew, the moment she brought me into the world of that, I think it was 1980s academia in New England, I was like, yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. But then with other ones, it took me a lot longer. Like, we've been talking a lot about Crime and Punishment. It took me longer, but I had made the commitment, and I'm really, really glad that I did. Same with The Adventures of Augie March. I knew why, I knew it was brilliant. Brilliant literature from word one. And that's by Saul Bellow, another one I'd encourage people to look at. And I said, it took me a little bit longer. It's like, okay, I get that he's really descriptive, but I don't get why I'm here. I don't, I don't, I don't love this main character yet. I don't love— why am I here? And just trusting that because it stood the test of time that I was going to get it eventually. And I did. And, um, you know, and then again was really, really sorry when it, when it finished. So, um, so again, the classics are just kind of like a way to— a shortcut to credibility, really, that, um, you know, they, they've been around for this long and they've been talked about this long for a reason. However, that doesn't mean that they are more credible or more right for you than other things that you can choose. But I, but I really love the perspective that we, that you've put on this, and I hope that the listeners have listened into our conversation and they've gone, "Do you know what, I'm going to give it a bit of a whirl, and I'm going to try it this way, or I might do it a little bit of Hazel's way or Judy May's way, or I definitely like the sound of this one." I'm going to put a list up of all the books that you've been reading since lockdown started. I could chat to you for a few more hours on this, Judy May, but unfortunately we're coming to the end of today's show. But thank you so much for joining us here on Get Booked. I know that I'm definitely— I've got 5 on my TBRs now that I'm definitely going to do. And I'm pretty certain there's quite a few of our listeners that's going to be embarking on some part of this quest as well. So thank you so much for helping us and kind of rekindling our love of the classics. Fantastic. I really hope that it does wake people up to what's instantly available for everybody. And, and definitely all the different ways that we can actually consume this knowledge rather than it being so incredibly daunting. So hopefully, uh, I can't wait to find out from all of our listeners what they've decided to start reading first. And Judy May, thank you so much for joining us here on Get Booked for Women's and Men's radio station. Absolute pleasure. That was the incredible Judy May Murphy joining us on Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield for Women's and Men's Radio Station. You can find out more about Judy May at judymay.tv, and if you want to have a look at the latest book reviews up on my blog, you can also do that at hazelbutterfield.com. You can also follow the show on Instagram @getbookedwrf. Now today on the show, we've been looking at Judy May's experience of embarking on reading over 80 classic novels since the beginning of lockdown. So many of us were hit with the lockdown and just suddenly went, "Wow, I need to fill my time. What can I do with this time so it doesn't feel lost?" And a lot of us chose to start reading, something that many of us thought maybe we didn't have time to do before, but 80 classics is a pretty incredible journey. I'm going to put a list of all the books that we've been talking about today and all the 80 different titles that Judy May has been reading, but I appreciate that there are many of you who do not have access to certain social medias, so I'm actually going to read out the whole list of what Judy May has read since March 2020. It's an incredible list, and I'm looking forward to working through quite a few myself as well. So, here goes! Leonard Cohen, The Book of Longing. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Dharma Bums, Visions of Cody, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. William S. Burroughs, Junkie. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. I hope you're appreciating my pronunciation of these as well. Lee Child's several Jack Reacher books. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. Dick Francis, Straight. Whip Hand, Flying Finish. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. Jack London, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Andrew Macmillan, Playtime. J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters. Seymour, An Introduction. P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel. Luke Wright, The Feel-Good Movie of the Year. Philip Larkin, Witson Weddings. S.F. Hinton, The Outsiders. James Clear, Automatic Habits. Neal Cassady, The Joan Anderson Letters. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Iris Murdoch, The Bell. Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Now that's one that I definitely want to put on my TBRs. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Rebecca Buxton, Lisa Whitting, The Philosopher Queens. Ikaro Uemura, The Courage to Be Disliked. Martin Lindström, biology. Maria Taylor, Dressing for the Afterlife. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping. That is one I'm just putting on my Amazon list right now. Willa Cather, oh, Pioneers. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped. Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems. Philip Larkin, High Windows. Donna Tartt, The Secret History. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Another one that's been added to my list. John Mageean, Amongst Women. Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Deadly Sins for Women and Girls. Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Keep Sharp. Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger. Peter Thiel, Zero to One. David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. I will pronounce this right eventually. George Eliot with Adam Bede. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. Ford Maddox, The Good Soldier. That is another one that's been added to my list. Stephen Joseph, What Doesn't Kill Us. Max Beerbaum, Zuleika Dobson. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep. Lieberman and Long, The Molecule of More. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. Seth Godin, This Is Marketing. Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. Henry David Thoreau, Walden. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Raymond Chandler, again, Farewell, My Lovely. Robert M. Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Play It As It Lays. Yet another one that has been added to my TBRs. And Inherent Vice, Finnegan's Wake, Infinite Jest, Tristan Shandy, and American Pastoral, all currently in the works and being read by Judy May. Thank you so much for listening in to today's Get Booked, and I hope we've encouraged you to embark on some of the classics too. Until next week, thank you for listening. I'm Hazel Butterfield.