Made In Scotland

Made In Scotland: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country by Billy Connolly
Published: 2018
Narrated by: Gordon Kennedy
Length: 06:17 (288 pages)

Growing up with two Scottish parents in Canada, I always remember Billy Connolly as the first Scottish accent I heard on television, excluding maybe Scotty from Star Trek and Sean Connery, neither of whom really count. Scotty always sounded like a drunk at a wedding trying to mimic my parents’ accents, and Sean Connery just sounds like Sean Connery.

When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to see Connolly’s stand-up, since my parents were quite strict about swearing and rude humour, but that just made his comedy all the more alluring. As I grew older, I became more and more of a fan. He always struck me as one of the few sincerely joyful people out there. I grew up with the old idea hammered into me that swearing was a sign of a lack in vocabulary, but I eventually came to realize that some of the most interesting and clever people would swear, people who enjoyed playing with the language, and Connolly is one of the best.

This is his first autobiography, published last year when he was 75 years old. He’s now an elderly hippie comedian, now mellowed somewhat, and he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years before this. It was a real treat hearing about his early life and start in comedy from his perspective, later in life. I bought this so quickly that I didn’t realize Connolly wasn’t the narrator of the audiobook. I was worried this wouldn’t work well, since he has such a distinct way of telling his own stories, but Gordon Kennedy did a brilliant job. There were times I forgot it wasn’t Connolly himself reading the book. This wasn’t because Kennedy was doing an impression of him. He just managed to give the reading as much character as Connolly would, just in his own way.

I was happy to find that Connolly is a fellow book geek. In the second chapter, he waxes on about the joys and benefits of being a life long reader. He even goes over a ‘What type of reader are you?’ quiz and writes about how he’s been each archetype at some point in his life. I felt like I was listening to him narrate a meme post on his book blog. He then gives a suggested reading list.

But there’s no right way to read. You are not studying for an exam. The important thing is that books do you good. They improve your life, and the lives of the people around you. They improve you. So, assuming you are dying to be given a suggested reading list by an elderly comedian, here are some of the books that, over the years, have made my life better…

• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac
• Blandings Castle by P.G Wodehouse
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Hard Times by Charles Dickens
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Penguin as an excerpt from this section of the book, if you’d like to read his thoughts on each novel.

I really enjoyed this. Billy Connolly is such a likable guy and his personality really comes through in the text. I need to get around to reading his travel writing at some point, as I’ve had his Canadian travelogue Journey to the Edge of the World on the shelf for ages now. Pamela Stephenson – psychologist, writer, once-comedian, television presenter, and wife to Billy Connolly – wrote a biography of her husband in 2002, which I think would also be quite interesting.