Brian Eno For Bibliophiles

In which I surrender to a massive crush on Brian Eno, and strongly recommend you read his newly reissued diary.

It is October, 2005. I am a 20-year-old Alaskan, overseas for the first time, on a long-awaited study-abroad program at NUI Galway. The fact that I am really here feels a little extra surreal because it’s where my favorite novel, Juno & Juliet, is set. It’s written by some Irish fellow called Julian Gough, and it baffles me that any male could possibly write into being a female whose inner monologue so eerily matches my own. Twitter has not yet been invented, which means there’s no way to investigate him online, so I do it the old-fashioned way — I find him in the pub, and say hi. We strike up something that’s not just an easy-going friendship, but also not a romance — a strange fondness, you might call it.

For my birthday that February, Julian gives me a book: A Year With Swollen Appendices, by Brian Eno. At 21, I am vaguely aware of Brian Eno as that guy who looks the most mundane in footage of U2, and the most freaky in images of Roxy Music. I know a lot of music-obsessed dudes, like my brother, think highly of him, read entire essays he’s written on bells and things like that. Why one would read his daily diary entries from 1995, I have no idea. But this book clearly means a lot to…