Brian Eno’s albums, such as Another Green World, Discreet Music, and the widely acclaimed Ambient 1: Music for Airports, redefined possibilities for electronic music and enthralled global audiences. As a producer, Eno shaped landmark records by David Bowie (Low, “Heroes”, Lodger), Talking Heads, U2, and many others. Beyond music, Eno is a visual artist and thinker—and the inventor of the Oblique Strategies cards, a set of prompts designed to help break creative blocks.
Brian Eno has long been interested in systems, long-term thinking, and how culture is built. He sits on the board of the Long Now Foundation, an organization dedicated to fostering responsibility across the next 10,000 years. One of the Foundation’s most prominent projects is its Manual for Civilization—a proposed library of roughly 3,500 books that could help humanity sustain or rebuild civilization after a catastrophe. Eno personally contributed a carefully chosen list of twenty titles to the project, and his selections range across history, politics, philosophy, sociology, architecture, design, nature, and literature.
The twenty books Brian Eno selected for the Manual for Civilization are:
- Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
- The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
- Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
- The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel
- Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill
- Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese
- A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al.
- The Face of Battle by John Keegan
- A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
- The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci
- The Confidence Trap by David Runciman
- The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin
- Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
- The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey-Wilson
- Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir
- Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
These choices reveal Eno’s characteristic interests: the deep structures of human cooperation and conflict, the role of art and ritual, the practical knowledge needed to feed and house people, and the intellectual tools required to understand complexity.
An even fuller picture of the books that have shaped Eno appears in his 1996 diary-memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices. The book mixes day-to-day entries with longer essays on art, technology, and culture, and it ends with an extensive bibliography of works he was reading or thinking about at the time. That list includes many of the same authors (Alexander, Braudel, Rorty, Boorstin) along with a wide range of other titles that reflect his curiosity about systems theory, evolutionary biology, urbanism, aesthetics, history, and literature.
Books from Eno’s Memoir
- Best Ideas: A Compendium of Social Innovation edited by Nicholas Albery
- A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets by Christopher Alexander
- Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andrić
- Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber
- The Artful Universe by John Barrow
- Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- The Creators by Daniel Boorstin
- Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery edited by B.A. Botkin
- How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
- Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel
- The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld
- The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto
- River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins
- Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
- Defence Policy Making edited by G.M. Dillon
- Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes by Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
- Trust by Francis Fukuyama
- Edge City by Joel Garreau
- Ecce Homo by George Grosz
- Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall
- Managing the Commons by Garrett Hardin and John Baden
- The Middle Ages by Friedrich Heer
- Going Bugs by James Hillman
- Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes
- The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga
- The State We’re In by Will Hutton
- Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization by Kevin Kelly
- Wild Blue Yonder by Nick Krotz
- Fetish Girls by Eric Kroll
- The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Artificial Life by Steven Levy
- Planetary Overload by A.J. McMichael
- Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
- Erotica Universalis by Gilles Néret
- Living Without a Goal by Jay Ogilvy
- Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
- Evolution of Consciousness by Robert E. Ornstein
- Art and Pornography and Man’s Rage for Chaos by Morse Peckham
- Works and Texts by Tom Phillips
- The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
- In Search of a Better World by Karl Popper
- Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone
- Postcards by Annie Proulx
- Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
- The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
- England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage
- Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave
- Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain
- I Am That: Conversations with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
- Face of the Gods and Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson
- Ocean of Sound by David Toop
- The Seven Cultures of Capitalism by Charles Hampden-Turner
- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
- Art and Anarchy by Edgar Wind
Taken together, the Manual for Civilization list and the longer bibliography from A Year with Swollen Appendices offer a revealing map of Eno’s mind. He is pragmatic yet philosophical, historical yet forward-looking, and deeply interested in how humans make meaning, organize themselves, and create beauty under constraint. For readers who admire Eno’s music and ideas, these books provide a rich continuation of the conversation he has been having, through song and art, with culture for more than fifty years.
Find the Brian Eno’s favorite books on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might also enjoy “David Bowie’s Favorite Books Categorized and David Lynch’s Favorite Books.
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