In an article written for Penguin Books, in October 2018, Billy Connolly provided a suggested reading list, and of the 12 books he listed, one of them was the undernoted - written by my cousin (six times removed).
For a young Billy Connolly, the library was his salvation. He discusses his love of literature and how it has accompanied him through his adult life.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
"Now, here’s a character! James Hogg was a shepherd from a village in the Borders called Ettrick. They call him the Ettrick Shepherd. In fact, I think somebody once called him the Electric Shepherd! I was first attracted to Hogg when I read a quote by him in a bookshop in Inverness. He said, ‘I spent most of my youth trying to lose my innocence and succeeded only in finding a higher form of innocence.’ I read that and I thought, Oh, I like you! It felt like he was writing about me. Because with all the reading I was doing, and the playing instruments, and trying to make something of myself and change my life . . . I wasn’t becoming somebody else. I had thought I would become this other person, but all I was becoming was a bigger version of what I already was. Hogg wrote this work of genius, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justifed Sinner, about twins who are desperately unlike each other. You eventually – spoiler alert! – conclude that it is two sides of the same person. It’s like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but it came before it. It’s a brilliant book – and it was written by a wee shepherd! A few people have tried to make it into a film, and Peter McDougall did a good version for T V. James Hogg should be a much bigger figure in Scotland than he is. Everybody goes on about Robert Burns, which is great, but they don’t seem to have room to celebrate anybody else, which is a pity. So, go on! Read the Electric Shepherd!"
