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Artist and music producer Brian Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appendices, which takes the form of his personal diary of the year 1995 with essayistic chapters (the "swollen appendices") on topics like "edge culture," generative music, new ways of singing, pretension, CD-ROMs (a relevant topic back then), and payment structures for recording artists (a relevant topic again today). It also includes a fair bit of Eno's correspondence with Stewart Brand, once editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and now president of the Long Now Foundation, "a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture" meant to "help make long-term thinking more common" and "creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."









It so happens that Eno now sits on the Long Now Foundation’s board and has had a hand in some of its projects. Naturally, he contributed suggested reading material to the foundation's Manual of Civilization, a collection of books humanity could use to rebuild civilization, should it need rebuilding. Eno's full list, which spans history, politics, philosophy, sociology, architecture, design, nature, and literature, runs as follows:

If you'd like to know more books that have shaped Eno's thinking, do pick up a copy of A Year with Swollen Appendices. Like all the best diarists, Eno makes plenty of references to his day-to-day reading material, and at the very end — beyond the last swollen appendix — he includes a bibliography, on which you'll find more from Christopher Alexander, a reappearance of Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, and even Steward Brand's own How Buildings Learn (on a television version of which the two would collaborate):

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.