Saturday, March 16, 2019

16th sentence of the 16th book




The 16th book* on my Kerouac bookshelf is Jack Kerouac's Pic (Grove Press, 1971), and the 16th sentence (in honor of today being the 16th day of the month) is:
So I knew they was a North Carolina, and they was a toad, and I dreamed of it 'at night. (p. 3)

Don't fret -- it's hard to understand this sentence with context. Pic often gets a bad rap for Kerouac's stereotypical attempt at Southern black dialect; however, it's not a bad story and it's must reading for Kerouac fans.


*Actually, the next book on the shelf was Kerouac's Scattered Poems, but as we saw with San Francisco Blues, it doesn't lend itself to sentence counting so I skipped it for purposes of this project.

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