Billy Connolly is no stranger to books with the Big Yin having admitted how important a place the library was for him in his younger days.
One particular Glasgow library holds a special place in Connolly's heart with him admitting in an interview with Penguin Books that: "Partick Library was heaven. When you walked in the door the library was on the left and on the right was a newspaper section.
"They had the newspapers, on sticks, ready to be read in an upright position. Old men used to come in to read the papers in the warm. There was a wonderful atmosphere of the old guys reading the papers and looking for somebody to talk to, and young guys darting about and having a laugh. Partick Library was a lovely place to be. I’m so glad it’s still there today. "Going to the library changed my life. It may even have saved it."
From James Joyce to Roberts Burns, here are 12 of Billy Connolly's favourite books.
1. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
"I read The Call of the Wild and its companion book, White Fang, as a schoolboy. They did me a lot of good. The stories are both narrated by wolves and they tell you of their troubles trying to cope with the human race. After I read White Fang, I used to march around Partick imagining I was an intrepid prospector striding through the snowy Canadian wilderness in search of gold."
2. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
"There are some books you should read at a certain age and On the Road is one of them. So is The Dharma Bums: most Kerouac, in fact. I read them as a young man, a young hippy, in the Sixties and I was taken with them. But I’ve tried to reread them later in life and I can’t. There is a trendiness about them that irritates me, and all that ‘I’m trying to find out who I am, man, I’m looking for me!’ crap gets on my tits. But when I was in my late teens and wanting to go travelling and meet girls and smoke dope and stay up all night, those books spoke to me – they offered me a world of possibility that just didn’t seem to exist in Partick."
3. Blandings Castle by P.G Wodehouse
"My father made me read P. G. Wodehouse. That makes it sound like a punishment but it wasnae. I remember the first time I read Blandings Castle, I actually fell out of bed from laughing. I was reading about a conman who was pretending to be a missionary, and who was giving a speech about a safari he had supposedly been on. He said, ‘I was walking through the longolongo grass when I was set upon by a wild bongobongo. Luckily, I heard the noise of a jongojongo, played by a member of the wongowongo tribe who leapt over the zongozongo . . .’ and at about the eighth ‘ongo‐ongo’ word I totally lost it. I was laughing so much that my limbs wouldn’t work properly and balance and gravity didn’t seem to be the same any more. I slid right onto the floor. Once, I went to Stephen Fry’s birthday party and he introduced me to his parents. I said, ‘I don’t believe they are your parents. I think you were written by P. G. Wodehouse.’ Stephen said it was one of the greatest compliments he had ever had. If you read Wodehouse it will change you and change your language."
4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
"I’m a huge Mark Twain fan: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I tried to read Tom Sawyer to my children and I failed. I read it as a child but it is a mistake to think it’s a book for children – it is much more sophisticated than that. It was too much for my kids when they were wee, so I waited until they were older and then put them on to it."