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The Nature Book
Part sweeping evocation of Earth’s rhythms, part literary archive, part post-human novel, The Nature Book collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.
What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction’s traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.
What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction’s traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2023
36 people are currently reading
1179 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
March 30, 2024
An ambitious experiment in language and collecting passages from beloved novels of the past and present, Comitta constructs a book that completely omits their own writing voice to make other writer’s passages about nature take center stage.
Written from 300 books where there are passages about nature and natural forces around us, Comitta pays tribute to how nature is indeed present in all literary works, conscious or not.
Written from 300 books where there are passages about nature and natural forces around us, Comitta pays tribute to how nature is indeed present in all literary works, conscious or not.
July 16, 2023
Unlike nothing I've ever read.
This book has such a simple concept but it's very original and well executed. The author took excerpts from over 300 books where nature is being described, then cut and pasted them together into this 'novel'. These are parts of a book that are usually skipped or considered not important, just scenery being described to create a mood. But here, these fragments threaded together create an outstanding effect.
I read this book in basically a sort of trance. Nature in this book has a story and has a temperament. The book describes how seasons go by, how a storm in the sea feels, how deep and empty space can be, how frightening the heat in a desert.
A book that shows how extraordinary writing can be.
Music for this book:
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons Recomposed - Max Richter
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain."
"And through these great stretches, this life of flowers, this world of colour, this chaos of perfume, down here, below the hills, there was no place that was not alive with something."
"The universe now appeared as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe."
"Death was marching in relentless order across the world, obliterating, destroying everything - all those dead fish in the sea, yes! Thousands! Millions! All the storm-tossed dead trees standing stark and white. Rotten stumps. Dead branches. Then there were the barren lands full of tall dead weeds.. A dead colt in a field, the poor form stretched in tainted grass, eyeless and naked."
"Since the beginning, time was a form of sustenance, pleasant as the spring comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter."
"All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now' "
This book has such a simple concept but it's very original and well executed. The author took excerpts from over 300 books where nature is being described, then cut and pasted them together into this 'novel'. These are parts of a book that are usually skipped or considered not important, just scenery being described to create a mood. But here, these fragments threaded together create an outstanding effect.
I read this book in basically a sort of trance. Nature in this book has a story and has a temperament. The book describes how seasons go by, how a storm in the sea feels, how deep and empty space can be, how frightening the heat in a desert.
A book that shows how extraordinary writing can be.
Music for this book:
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons Recomposed - Max Richter
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain."
"And through these great stretches, this life of flowers, this world of colour, this chaos of perfume, down here, below the hills, there was no place that was not alive with something."
"The universe now appeared as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe."
"Death was marching in relentless order across the world, obliterating, destroying everything - all those dead fish in the sea, yes! Thousands! Millions! All the storm-tossed dead trees standing stark and white. Rotten stumps. Dead branches. Then there were the barren lands full of tall dead weeds.. A dead colt in a field, the poor form stretched in tainted grass, eyeless and naked."
"Since the beginning, time was a form of sustenance, pleasant as the spring comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter."
"All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now' "
January 18, 2024
Liquid gold drips from the pages of this if you dare to let it seep...
Read
December 15, 2023Like staring at a computer wallpaper.
A time and place for everything.
A time and place for everything.
April 29, 2025
Post-modernist attempts to touch grass, misses.
August 6, 2023
“On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.” From the Nature Book
‘On Earth, time is marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguish day from night that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening, and diminishing, something neither alive or dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.’ - Jhumpa Lahiri "The Lowland"
I am still studying the book like I have a college final, nay, a life final on it. Such a spectacular book, I can’t even. I will admit that I couldn’t read it in one go, I find I do need a narrative of meaning to go along with my nature scenes, but I am that person that devours the nature scenes and skims the talk-talk-talking scenes, which the author and many others think is unusual. I cherish the metaphors I have gleaned from great books, and the author has put them together in a long, winding, Proustian, gorgeous poem-like novel.
As I was reading, I am a nerd, so I was trying to associate certain lines with certain authors. Willa Cather was obvious to me, James Joyce, also; I also picked up some Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Kerouac, LM Montgomery, Herman Melville, and John Steinbeck. I did not recognize any Douglas Adams, which surprised me, or some others and I have read about 60 of the 300 books the author, who uses they/them pronouns, used. That is part of their magic; they used portions of sentences like above, and took out the humans, and sometimes the sentences stood on their own, and sometimes they were blended, and more than 1 author wrote the words in a particular sentence.
I am just in awe, and can’t help but wonder, if we lived in a world where not as much literature has been digitized, would it be as magic? I couldn’t read objectively, or at least on this 1 ½ readings I could not, I was seeking the identities of the writers of the words. Not sure what that signifies about my brain but it was really fun. Reading it purely next time would be fun, too.
I also love love love that the author sought out a wildly beautiful diverse group of authors to draw from: Amy Tan, Colson Whitehead, Elizabeth Gaskell, Langston Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yann Martel, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Kate Chopin to name a few. The selection of obscure or unknown to me ones were amazing, also, and my to-read list is broadened by his selections. The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara, A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, are some, and it also inspired me to read some Thomas Hardy, I really liked a lot of his metaphors.
Some sentences were completely inscrutable even with some dedicated googling, so they may have been several authors blended seamlessly, but I can live with that unknowing. I loved this book; it is fascinating, lyrical, flowing, and a novel of the land and flora and fauna of earth that is utterly unique. The author was interrogating the ways writers portrayed nature, and found some themes, which is a whole other way to read the book. I just loved the journey this time.
A few of my favorite examples:
As is
Time-lapse of a million billion flowers opening their heads, of a million billion flowers bowing, closing their heads again, of a million billion new flowers opening instead, of a million billion buds becoming leaves then the leaves falling off and rotting into earth, of a million billion twigs splitting into a million billion brand new buds.
AUTUMN BY ALI SMITH
Small changes:
Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike. From The Nature Book
Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were aliketo him.
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
The hologram sky glittered with new forms much different from their predecessors, fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.
Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.
William Gibson, Neuromancer
More significant changes:
When the days were longer, when summer afternoons were spacious, laughter was on the earth.(unknown source) From the Nature Book
But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. George Eliot, Middlemarch
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made; the knife-like edge of the sharper waves—all this was thrilling and terrible, like poetry within language. Unknown source.
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;— all this was thrilling.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Unknown sources:
Peering between the stars in the outer darkness, among many millions of other faint stars, there were stars of sweetness—an eighth-magnitude star, a nineteenth-magnitude star—and nascent new stars.
Something special in the wind, the crickets and the birds, the stars swimming in schools through the night sky. Something special at the end of summer, a grand finale …
Soon the unvarying emptiness of the country was full of music, and part of it came from the great, bright stars swinging so low above the prairie. The stars were singing. The whisper of the sweeping wheat was swallowed up in their song, as if glutted with sound.
I really appreciated the author including their process, and there is a great Lithub article with an excerpt where the author lists their sources in order. Some of their words in the intro and outro, spoiler alert:
Whichever way you look at it, The Nature Book operates inside several contradictions—somewhere between past and present, human and nature, narrative and archive, lyrical excess and data analysis. It’s a puzzle I pieced together from fragments of literary history, and now, sitting in your hands, or on a table or a shelf, an awkward cousin to the books around it, alien to and yet entirely of them.
With a lot of table space while I was in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, one summer, I printed out my three-thousand-page corpus, cut it up, and separated each macropattern onto a different table. There was a winter table, a desert table, an outer space table, etc. Then I went through each table/macropattern and sorted the language into smaller piles/micropatterns. With each pattern laid out, I went to work grouping language from each table into a separate narrative. Once all micropatterns were used up and each macropattern seemed exhausted, I then worked to connect these separate narratives into a novel-length story.
Descriptions may overlap in order to keep the narrative moving. Sometimes the only way I could meet my constraints was to connect two fragments via an overlapping word or phrase. For instance, these two fragments: “starved for color, for life. The new sense of” (Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland) and “sense of coolness in the air” (Frank Norris, The Octopus) become “… starved for color, for life. The new sense of coolness in the air …”
‘On Earth, time is marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguish day from night that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening, and diminishing, something neither alive or dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away.’ - Jhumpa Lahiri "The Lowland"
I am still studying the book like I have a college final, nay, a life final on it. Such a spectacular book, I can’t even. I will admit that I couldn’t read it in one go, I find I do need a narrative of meaning to go along with my nature scenes, but I am that person that devours the nature scenes and skims the talk-talk-talking scenes, which the author and many others think is unusual. I cherish the metaphors I have gleaned from great books, and the author has put them together in a long, winding, Proustian, gorgeous poem-like novel.
As I was reading, I am a nerd, so I was trying to associate certain lines with certain authors. Willa Cather was obvious to me, James Joyce, also; I also picked up some Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack Kerouac, LM Montgomery, Herman Melville, and John Steinbeck. I did not recognize any Douglas Adams, which surprised me, or some others and I have read about 60 of the 300 books the author, who uses they/them pronouns, used. That is part of their magic; they used portions of sentences like above, and took out the humans, and sometimes the sentences stood on their own, and sometimes they were blended, and more than 1 author wrote the words in a particular sentence.
I am just in awe, and can’t help but wonder, if we lived in a world where not as much literature has been digitized, would it be as magic? I couldn’t read objectively, or at least on this 1 ½ readings I could not, I was seeking the identities of the writers of the words. Not sure what that signifies about my brain but it was really fun. Reading it purely next time would be fun, too.
I also love love love that the author sought out a wildly beautiful diverse group of authors to draw from: Amy Tan, Colson Whitehead, Elizabeth Gaskell, Langston Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yann Martel, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Kate Chopin to name a few. The selection of obscure or unknown to me ones were amazing, also, and my to-read list is broadened by his selections. The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara, A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, are some, and it also inspired me to read some Thomas Hardy, I really liked a lot of his metaphors.
Some sentences were completely inscrutable even with some dedicated googling, so they may have been several authors blended seamlessly, but I can live with that unknowing. I loved this book; it is fascinating, lyrical, flowing, and a novel of the land and flora and fauna of earth that is utterly unique. The author was interrogating the ways writers portrayed nature, and found some themes, which is a whole other way to read the book. I just loved the journey this time.
A few of my favorite examples:
As is
Time-lapse of a million billion flowers opening their heads, of a million billion flowers bowing, closing their heads again, of a million billion new flowers opening instead, of a million billion buds becoming leaves then the leaves falling off and rotting into earth, of a million billion twigs splitting into a million billion brand new buds.
AUTUMN BY ALI SMITH
Small changes:
Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike. From The Nature Book
Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were aliketo him.
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
The hologram sky glittered with new forms much different from their predecessors, fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.
Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass.
William Gibson, Neuromancer
More significant changes:
When the days were longer, when summer afternoons were spacious, laughter was on the earth.(unknown source) From the Nature Book
But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. George Eliot, Middlemarch
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made; the knife-like edge of the sharper waves—all this was thrilling and terrible, like poetry within language. Unknown source.
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;— all this was thrilling.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Unknown sources:
Peering between the stars in the outer darkness, among many millions of other faint stars, there were stars of sweetness—an eighth-magnitude star, a nineteenth-magnitude star—and nascent new stars.
Something special in the wind, the crickets and the birds, the stars swimming in schools through the night sky. Something special at the end of summer, a grand finale …
Soon the unvarying emptiness of the country was full of music, and part of it came from the great, bright stars swinging so low above the prairie. The stars were singing. The whisper of the sweeping wheat was swallowed up in their song, as if glutted with sound.
I really appreciated the author including their process, and there is a great Lithub article with an excerpt where the author lists their sources in order. Some of their words in the intro and outro, spoiler alert:
Whichever way you look at it, The Nature Book operates inside several contradictions—somewhere between past and present, human and nature, narrative and archive, lyrical excess and data analysis. It’s a puzzle I pieced together from fragments of literary history, and now, sitting in your hands, or on a table or a shelf, an awkward cousin to the books around it, alien to and yet entirely of them.
With a lot of table space while I was in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, one summer, I printed out my three-thousand-page corpus, cut it up, and separated each macropattern onto a different table. There was a winter table, a desert table, an outer space table, etc. Then I went through each table/macropattern and sorted the language into smaller piles/micropatterns. With each pattern laid out, I went to work grouping language from each table into a separate narrative. Once all micropatterns were used up and each macropattern seemed exhausted, I then worked to connect these separate narratives into a novel-length story.
Descriptions may overlap in order to keep the narrative moving. Sometimes the only way I could meet my constraints was to connect two fragments via an overlapping word or phrase. For instance, these two fragments: “starved for color, for life. The new sense of” (Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland) and “sense of coolness in the air” (Frank Norris, The Octopus) become “… starved for color, for life. The new sense of coolness in the air …”
April 17, 2024
"This novel contains no words from me," the author writes by way of introduction. that's pretty unsettling, isn't it?
the nature book is unlike anything i’ve ever read. it's a collage, a mosaic of the most beautiful passages ever written about nature. the author has carefully selected them and transformed them into a coherent novel, a whole.
divided into several parts, each one celebrating the seasons, the forest, the ocean, the fauna, etc., the lines and pages follow one another and we rediscover mother nature little by little. it's a book to be savored little by little, letting yourself be carried away by the sometimes lyrical and poetic, sometimes graphic and fragrant descriptions of nature and all the beings that make it up.
the only downside is that I would personnaly have liked to know where each "chapter" came from, to make the link with the original work. not doing so allowed the author to create a novel format and it can be a little game for readers to recognize their favorite works and authors. at the end of the book, there's a list of the titles of the 300-plus books that were used, but it's not clear which page each extract refers to. there are many passages that I didn't know, that made an impression on me and that I would have liked to know where they came from.
that being said, the nature book completely reinvents the traditional concept of the "novel", an original and perfectly executed form. i was as much amazed by the originality of the structure, which is literally a work of art (you had to think of it, what a great idea!), as by the beauty of these words that celebrate nature through a great diversity of voices. a must-read for all nature lovers.
the nature book is unlike anything i’ve ever read. it's a collage, a mosaic of the most beautiful passages ever written about nature. the author has carefully selected them and transformed them into a coherent novel, a whole.
divided into several parts, each one celebrating the seasons, the forest, the ocean, the fauna, etc., the lines and pages follow one another and we rediscover mother nature little by little. it's a book to be savored little by little, letting yourself be carried away by the sometimes lyrical and poetic, sometimes graphic and fragrant descriptions of nature and all the beings that make it up.
the only downside is that I would personnaly have liked to know where each "chapter" came from, to make the link with the original work. not doing so allowed the author to create a novel format and it can be a little game for readers to recognize their favorite works and authors. at the end of the book, there's a list of the titles of the 300-plus books that were used, but it's not clear which page each extract refers to. there are many passages that I didn't know, that made an impression on me and that I would have liked to know where they came from.
that being said, the nature book completely reinvents the traditional concept of the "novel", an original and perfectly executed form. i was as much amazed by the originality of the structure, which is literally a work of art (you had to think of it, what a great idea!), as by the beauty of these words that celebrate nature through a great diversity of voices. a must-read for all nature lovers.
Read
June 15, 2024i don’t want to rate this because i read it so bit by bit… it feels like a meditation every time you open it. avant-garde in structure though so definitely not for everyone.
October 9, 2023
I love nature, I love reading about nature, I love descriptions of nature. So when I got this book as a gift, I started it with much happy anticipation. It has been torture getting through it. And I've tried for weeks. It's dreadful, a total waste of time.
The book is an INSULT to nature. It feels like it was written by AI - by someone who is unable to experience nature, or see it, or experience the wonder and beauty. Chapter after chapter are just empty words strung together. The "writer"/compiler tries to make an effort to weave small narratives, but the problem is none of if makes any sense.
Anyone who has experienced nature and understands nature will be baffled by the myriad things that don't make sense. Tom Comitta, the compiler who has put together this book by taking fragments of writing from other writers, mentions the sky, wind, weather, birds, animals – but they are all jumbled and thrown together like in a nonsensical landscape created by AI. The book has nothing to do with real nature. The book's title is a joke, and so is the book. It's like a freshman's high-concept art project that's just an utter abject failure. I feel angry that I wasted my time trying to get through the drivel.
The book is an INSULT to nature. It feels like it was written by AI - by someone who is unable to experience nature, or see it, or experience the wonder and beauty. Chapter after chapter are just empty words strung together. The "writer"/compiler tries to make an effort to weave small narratives, but the problem is none of if makes any sense.
Anyone who has experienced nature and understands nature will be baffled by the myriad things that don't make sense. Tom Comitta, the compiler who has put together this book by taking fragments of writing from other writers, mentions the sky, wind, weather, birds, animals – but they are all jumbled and thrown together like in a nonsensical landscape created by AI. The book has nothing to do with real nature. The book's title is a joke, and so is the book. It's like a freshman's high-concept art project that's just an utter abject failure. I feel angry that I wasted my time trying to get through the drivel.
April 19, 2023
It’s a beautiful piece. It is a relaxing read when I leaned into that nature is the main character. I’m enjoying reading passages to my son as we sit in our beautiful back yard in north FL at sunset. I think many of them could be written about what we see there.
May 10, 2023
I have some friends who would HATE this book. I think it’s fascinating. Can’t comment on the quality of the writing as such, but the arrangement of the passages into a narrative which is not only coherent, but also beautiful, is admirable.
June 9, 2025
2.5 stars
Lowkey the introduction and afterword are more interesting than the actual book, but I guess that’s kinda the point huh
Lowkey the introduction and afterword are more interesting than the actual book, but I guess that’s kinda the point huh
Read
July 1, 2024Considering that my primary complaint with stories that emphasize nature is that there's not enough nature writing, you would think that I've met my match with this one: a book that is ONLY nature writing and intentionally excludes humans as subject. I'm on Lorde's mailing list, and this was one of her book recs: a literary Supercut. I got it immediately.
To be honest, this has been the most difficult book for me to get through in a while. It is a stunning resource and collage, and I will definitely circle back to it as a nature writing archive. As someone who does a lot of informal nature writing, I definitely gained new insights and appreciations from this book. Though Comitta does a great job stringing the excerpts together, I just don't know if it achieves the goal of being a novel and following the "traditional novelistic narrative." But maybe I think that because I only read stories about humans, and I can't let the vastness of nature take the leading role.
The inconsistency in narrator was both dizzying and refreshing, and it shines a light on human projections of nature in a really fascinating way. As I keep thinking about this book, I'm leaning more towards it being brilliant but a tough read because of its novelty. I love it now that I'm done with it.
To be honest, this has been the most difficult book for me to get through in a while. It is a stunning resource and collage, and I will definitely circle back to it as a nature writing archive. As someone who does a lot of informal nature writing, I definitely gained new insights and appreciations from this book. Though Comitta does a great job stringing the excerpts together, I just don't know if it achieves the goal of being a novel and following the "traditional novelistic narrative." But maybe I think that because I only read stories about humans, and I can't let the vastness of nature take the leading role.
The inconsistency in narrator was both dizzying and refreshing, and it shines a light on human projections of nature in a really fascinating way. As I keep thinking about this book, I'm leaning more towards it being brilliant but a tough read because of its novelty. I love it now that I'm done with it.
April 29, 2023
The Nature Book is both a meditative and exciting tribute to the non-human world, through the lens of gorgeous and strange (and human) language. An ideal day to me would be to read this book on the beach, or in a jungle, or on a glacier. Comitta’s fascinating collage process generates a beautiful journey through weather and land and oceans and animals, providing us with the etherial utterances of frogs, waves and more. Humans are pretty over-rated (though their language can be pretty weird and great). Thank you Tom for this book, it’s one I’ll revisit over and over again. Please check out this book and their other work as well.
November 10, 2025
The Nature Book is a book composed of other author's nature scenes (and just nature scenes) spliced together into a book. Imagine 270 pages of descriptions of weather, rockforms, animals, and plants, that were meant to be part of texts with humans (well not in the case of Watership Down I guess), all strung together. It felt to me that the text was always beginning to and trying to go somewhere - but never getting anywhere. 6 pages of sources are listed. A lot of books. Some snippets from Moby Dick were obvious. Much of the ending desert setting seemed to come from Lonesome Dove. (love me some Lonesome Dove. Hundreds of books are sampled.
December 7, 2023
This was a really enjoyable book! It's probably not for everyone, but I thought it was a very imaginative project - to construct a novel out of only the descriptions of nature taken from around 300 novels. The result is well executed, very admirably achieved. Is it really 'a novel without humans' as the book cover calls it? I don't know about that - it felt to me somewhat more like a very long prose poem. Very engrossing, although I never did forget that it was a project. I went back and forth between text and audio and they're both very good.
June 12, 2024
Well. I finally did it. 3.5 stars on this. I can’t expect it to have been any more than what I knew it was. If you want to read something “untouched” by human activity, this is the book for you.
On the rare occasion that I could actually lock in to these narratives, I really enjoyed visualizing them and they’ve got me craving a camping trip. But it’s definitely a slog.
On the rare occasion that I could actually lock in to these narratives, I really enjoyed visualizing them and they’ve got me craving a camping trip. But it’s definitely a slog.
August 11, 2024
Intriguing and innovative, but unfortunately tedious in execution.
I tend to read fiction and narrative NF for character first and foremost, and a captivating plot helps to hold my interest. This book's concept, though admirable, precludes both.
If your bookshelves are populated solely by a love for language, this one might be worth keeping around to sample a chapter here and there. However, I reckon you'd get more from any of your preferred poetry volumes.
2.5 stars, rounded to 3 for the effort involved in fitting the found pieces together into a tenuous whole.
I tend to read fiction and narrative NF for character first and foremost, and a captivating plot helps to hold my interest. This book's concept, though admirable, precludes both.
If your bookshelves are populated solely by a love for language, this one might be worth keeping around to sample a chapter here and there. However, I reckon you'd get more from any of your preferred poetry volumes.
2.5 stars, rounded to 3 for the effort involved in fitting the found pieces together into a tenuous whole.
April 18, 2023
The Nature Book is epic, beautiful, and made me drift into thoughts I want to stay with for years. I think I will be buying this as a gift for friends and family every chance I get, just to give someone the gift of awe, wonder and magic. Highly recommend.
December 18, 2024
Must confess that DNF. I liked the concept of a "communally written" work about nature much more than the execution. It's on my shelf. Will I find time to give this book another chance? Remains to be seen....
September 27, 2025
Parts of this book blew me away and other oats dragged on interminably, almost like time itself, making the book feel as timeless as nature itself, which of course, it is. The would probably read it again, but with patience and in bite-sizes chunks.
February 17, 2023
This is cool.
April 13, 2023
Sorry, awful.
April 18, 2023
Beautiful and haunting! Read this book and then take yourself on a long solitary hike.
April 27, 2023
Maybe it just wasn’t for me? Maybe I wasn’t in the right headspace at the time? I love the concept, and I love the idea and the language. But I just couldn’t get super into this.
May 18, 2023
Exhausting.
July 2, 2023
really amazing & endlessly fascinating--i have to ask about the gain of a "novel." why the form? what's the purchase?
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July 3, 2023I love the concept of this book. Alas I did not love it in fact. It turns out I don't have much patience or attention (it's not you, it's me!) for descriptions of what is happening on earth when observation of what is happening is the sole focus of the book. I only gave it 20 pages, but I didn't feel like it would change much if I persisted.
I have enjoyed books like Henry Beston's The Outermost House and Berndt Heinrich's A Cabin in Maine. But this amalgam of writers' scene setting, even when arranged in thoughtful and thematic ways, felt dead.
I have enjoyed books like Henry Beston's The Outermost House and Berndt Heinrich's A Cabin in Maine. But this amalgam of writers' scene setting, even when arranged in thoughtful and thematic ways, felt dead.
July 3, 2023
I’ve been asking myself since college whether it is possible to have a book without a subject—this is it! I am so happy it exists. What a feat.
July 10, 2023
Quite astonishing and visionary.
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