The Nature Book - Tom Comitta - Bog

Composed of fragments from hundreds of novels written across the span of hundreds of years, but reads very smoothly, truly like a novel. The changes in voice and style as the different original texts weave in and out of each other is fascinating and engaging.
Tom's work is rigorous and conceptual but also playful and humorous. The afterword to the book outlines the literary constraints they took on to write the book and explains their process and philosophy. There is also a complete list of all the books used as source material.
For readers of conceptual literature like Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and George Sanders' Lincoln in the Bardo.
From Tom: The Nature Book is "a tale of how authors have rendered, distorted, praised, belittled, projected onto and spoken through countless animals, landforms and weather patterns. In these ways there is no nature in this book; it's all illusion and distortion. Entirely human. The Nature Book is also a story of times past. The natural world described by Austen and Dickens is di¿erent than that of Plath and Pynchon . . . and yet even further away from the time of this writing, when the e¿ects of climate change are already showing their teeth and are slowly beginning to appear in our fiction."