Billy Connolly is no stranger to books, having often spoken about how vital the library was to him while growing up in Glasgow.
One Glasgow library, in particular, holds a special place in his heart, as he revealed in an interview with Penguin Books saying “When I was an unhappy little boy, going to the library changed my life. It may even have saved it. Amazing as it sounds, literature can do that for you. Books are your ticket to the whole world. They’re a free ticket to the entire earth. They’re an entry to conversations you wouldn’t be privy to otherwise. :
“People often say that football and boxing are the ways out of the working class and they are your ticket out of that kind of life, if you happen to want to leave it. But, for me, the library is the key. That is where the escape tunnel is. All of the knowledge in the world is there. The great brains of the world are at your fingertips.
“With my aunt making my life hell and Big Rosie beating the shit out of me on a daily basis, I lived in a dark and forbidding world as a kid. But I only had to leave our home and walk over the tramlines to Partick Library and a whole new world opened to me. Reading books showed me that there was something better, something other, out there.
“It made me realise that, despite the constant misery of my day‐to‐day existence, the world might actually be a good place, and an exciting one.
"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.
“I can still remember joining the library, being given my little member’s card and being all proud, and being led over to the children’s section. There were books that I have never seen since, such as Cowboys Cowboys Cowboys and Pirates Pirates Pirates. You were allowed to take one home to read and bring it back a week later, and it felt such a privilege to be allowed to read a library book at home.
“I loved everything about the library. It would be a big social event. I’d meet up with my friends in there and we’d consult about the 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." | Penguin Books
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." | Penguin Books
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." | Penguin Books
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." | Penguin