Reading List

Authors Like Brian Eno

In 1975, laid up in bed after a car accident, Brian Eno was given a record of eighteenth-century harp music by his friend Judy Nylon. It played far too quietly, and he could not reach the stereo to turn it up; it was raining outside. In the liner notes to Discreet Music, released that December, he wrote that this “presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment”. Three years later Music for Airports gave the idea a name: ambient music. The same year as the accident he and the painter Peter Schmidt published Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards for getting unstuck, and in the years after he produced Talking Heads and U2 and worked on David Bowie's Berlin albums. He has written about all of it: A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996), his diary of 1995, and What Art Does, an illustrated book made with the Amsterdam-born artist Bette Adriaanse and published by Faber in January 2025. Readers come to Eno for a way of thinking more than for any single record — about systems instead of masterpieces, about the scene instead of the lone genius, about listening. The writers below share that: they treat creativity as a set of conditions you can arrange, and attention as the material.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Music and listening · The creative process · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Brian Eno, start with John Cage's Silence, where chance and environmental sound first became a composer's method. For listening as a practice, read Pauline Oliveros. For the studio and the stage, David Byrne's How Music Works, by his closest collaborator. For long-term thinking, Stewart Brand, his partner in the Long Now Foundation. And for the producer as philosopher, Rick Rubin.

10 authors like Brian Eno

01
Where the method begins

John Cage

American · b. 1912 · Composer and writer

Cage was an American composer who used chance operations to make music and whose 4′33″ (1952) asks the performer to play nothing, so that the room becomes the piece. Silence: Lectures and Writings, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1961, collects his essays and lectures from 1939 to 1961, including “Lecture on Nothing” and the short anecdotes of “Indeterminacy”, several of them set out in unusual layouts on the page.

The book behind much of what Eno later made popular: the idea that a composer can set up a process and let it run, and that the sounds already around us are worth hearing. Cage is more austere and more playful at once — the anecdotes read like Zen stories — and where Eno wants music that sits in a room, Cage wants you to notice the room. Read it next to Oblique Strategies.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Cage →

02
Listening as a practice

Pauline Oliveros

American · b. 1932 · Composer

Oliveros was born in Houston in 1932, was a founding member and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 1960s, and became the first director of its successor at Mills College. She coined the term “deep listening” in 1988 after recording fourteen feet underground in a cistern in Port Townsend, Washington. Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (2005) sets out the exercises she taught for decades. She died in 2016.

Eno discovered a new way of hearing by accident; Oliveros built one on purpose and wrote down how to do it. Her book is a manual of attention — exercises for groups and for one person alone — and the natural next step for anyone who likes Eno's idea that listening is itself a creative act. She is less interested in records than in rooms and bodies.

— Lisanne
03
The collaborator's account

David Byrne

Scottish-American · b. 1952 · Musician and writer

Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1952, grew up in the United States and founded Talking Heads, whose records Eno produced at the end of the 1970s. The two made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), built on voices taken from radio, and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008). How Music Works, published by McSweeney's in 2012, mixes memoir with an argument about how venues, technology and money shape the music made for them.

The closest book on this page to Eno's own way of thinking, by the person who worked alongside him. Byrne's central idea — that music is shaped by the space it is made for, from cathedral to car stereo — is Eno's ambient idea turned into a history. He is more anecdotal and more systematic than Eno, and each chapter stands alone.

— Lisanne
Every book by David Byrne →
04
The Long Now

Stewart Brand

American · b. 1938 · Writer and editor · National Book Award 1972

Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968; The Last Whole Earth Catalog won the National Book Award in 1972. In 1996 he formed the Long Now Foundation with Danny Hillis, Brian Eno and others, to build a clock meant to run for ten thousand years. How Buildings Learn (1994) is about what happens to buildings after they are finished; The Clock of the Long Now sets out the foundation's case for long-term thinking.

The friend who turned one of Eno's notebook phrases into an institution: Eno named both the Clock and the Foundation, after writing that he wanted to live in “a Big Here and a Long Now”, and Brand tells that story in his book. Brand shares Eno's preference for systems that grow and adapt over objects that are finished, and How Buildings Learn applies it to architecture.

— Lisanne
05
The other producer-philosopher

Rick Rubin

American · b. 1963 · Music producer

Rubin co-founded Def Jam in his NYU dorm in 1984 and went on to produce records from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash's American Recordings. The Creative Act: A Way of Being, published by Penguin Press in January 2023, is a book of short chapters on attention, patience and getting out of the way of the work. In 2025 he followed it with The Way of Code, an adaptation of the Tao Te Ching.

The only other producer whose ideas about creativity are as widely read as Eno's, and a useful contrast. Both see the producer's job as setting up the conditions rather than imposing a sound; Rubin gets there through stillness and intuition, Eno through systems, rules and chance. Read The Creative Act after the cards.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rick Rubin →

06
Scenius, explained

Austin Kleon

American · b. 1983 · Writer and artist

Kleon, born in 1983, first became known for Newspaper Blackout (2010), poems made by blacking out newspaper columns. Steal Like an Artist (2012), Show Your Work! (2014) and Keep Going (2019) form a short illustrated trilogy on influence, sharing work and keeping at it. Show Your Work! is built on Eno's word “scenius”.

The writer who took Eno's idea of “scenius” — that good work comes out of a whole scene of people rather than a lone genius — and made it practical advice. Kleon is lighter and more hands-on than Eno, and his books read in an evening, but the conviction is the same: creativity is shared, copied and passed on.

— Lisanne

Every book by Austin Kleon →

07
Creativity as a habit

Twyla Tharp

American · b. 1941 · Choreographer

Tharp, born in Indiana in 1941, has made more than 135 dances, won a Tony Award for Movin' Out in 2003, and received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (2003) sets out her working method: a fixed early-morning routine, and a box for every new project into which she puts everything that might feed it.

Tharp's book is the nearest thing to Oblique Strategies in book form: a set of exercises and rules for getting past the blank start. Where Eno trusts chance and constraint, Tharp trusts routine, and readers who like his practical side — the instruction that gets you working again — usually find hers useful.

— Lisanne

Every book by Twyla Tharp →

08
Where ideas come from

David Lynch

American · b. 1946 · Filmmaker

Lynch made Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, and practised Transcendental Meditation for more than fifty years. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006) is a book of very short chapters on where his ideas came from, built around the image of ideas as fish you catch by diving deeper. He died in January 2025.

Another artist from outside literature who wrote a short, plain book about his process. Lynch and Eno both work with sound and atmosphere as much as with story, and both describe the artist's job as noticing what turns up. Lynch's method is inward and meditative where Eno's is systematic, and the contrast is the point.

— Lisanne

Every book by David Lynch →

09
The musician's notebook

Patti Smith

American · b. 1946 · Memoirist and poet · National Book Award 2010

Smith was a poet in New York before she was a singer, and her first album, Horses, came out in 1975. Just Kids, about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2010. M Train (2015) is a book of cafes, journeys and the dead, much of it about her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith.

For readers who loved the diary form of A Year with Swollen Appendices: a musician writing day by day about work, friends, reading and the ordinary rituals that keep the work going. Smith is more romantic and devotional than Eno, who is drier and more curious about how things work, but both treat prose as a separate art rather than a sideline.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patti Smith →

10
Music and the brain

Oliver Sacks

British · b. 1933 · Neurologist and writer

Sacks was a London-born neurologist who worked in New York and wrote case histories for general readers, including Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and Musicophilia (2007), about music and the brain. In December 2025 The New Yorker published Rachel Aviv's account of his private journals, in which he described embellishing and inventing details in some of those case histories.

Musicophilia asks the question underneath Eno's work from the other side: what music actually does to a listener. Sacks shares Eno's curiosity about perception and his pleasure in strange cases, and the book is the best general introduction to why sound can change a mood or a room. Read it knowing that some of his case histories have since been questioned.

— Lisanne

Every book by Oliver Sacks →

Where to start if you loved Brian Eno

If you want the ideas at their source, read John Cage.

Silence: chance, process and the sound of the room, from 1961.

If you want to listen better, read Pauline Oliveros.

Deep Listening: exercises, not theory.

If you want the studio story, read David Byrne.

How Music Works, by the man Eno made three Talking Heads records with.

If you want the long view, read Stewart Brand.

The Clock of the Long Now, the book behind the foundation Eno named.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Brian Eno

Who should I read if I love Brian Eno?

Start with John Cage's Silence (1961), where chance and environmental sound became a composer's method, and Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening (2005). David Byrne's How Music Works (2012) is by his closest collaborator, and Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now comes out of the foundation Eno helped form. For the creative process, read Rick Rubin's The Creative Act and Austin Kleon's Show Your Work!.

What books are like A Year with Swollen Appendices?

For another working artist's diary, read Patti Smith's M Train (2015). For a musician's book of essays and argument, read David Byrne's How Music Works. For the ideas Eno writes about — generative music, systems, the role of the artist — go back to John Cage's Silence.

What are Oblique Strategies?

A deck of cards Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt published in 1975, each printed with a short instruction or question meant to help an artist get past a block. You draw one when you are stuck and follow it. Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit is the closest book to it in spirit.

What is What Art Does by Brian Eno about?

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory is an illustrated book by Eno and the Amsterdam-born artist and novelist Bette Adriaanse, published by Faber in January 2025. It looks at how the made-up worlds of art — pop songs, detective novels, soap operas, even hairstyles — work in ordinary life, and proposes a theory of what art is for.

Did Brian Eno invent ambient music?

He coined the term with Ambient 1: Music for Airports in 1978, and Discreet Music (1975) is usually counted as its starting point. The thinking behind it — music as part of the environment, made by a process rather than composed note by note — owes a lot to John Cage, which is why Cage is first on this list.

What is scenius?

Eno's word for the creative intelligence of a whole scene, as opposed to the lone genius. Austin Kleon built his book Show Your Work! (2014) around it.

Footnotes

  1. Discreet Music — Wikipedia
  2. What Art Does — Brian Eno
  3. Brian Eno & Danny Hillis Seminar Primer — The Long Now Foundation
  4. Silence: Lectures and Writings — Wikipedia
  5. Pauline Oliveros — Wikipedia
  6. How Music Works — Wikipedia
  7. Austin Kleon, Show Your Work — The Marginalian
  8. Stewart Brand interview — The Sun

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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