Read a version of The Jungle Book written in meows, thanks to this program

Moby-Dick is a long and strenuous book to read, but what if you could read the canonical work of literature as a cat might — in only meows.

In honor (or mockery) of National Novel Writing Month, programmer Darius Kazemi invented a new creative endeavor: National Novel Generator Month. It started as a joke on Twitter, as many great things do, in 2013:

Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end

— Darius Kazemi (@tinysubversions) November 1, 2013

The goal of NaNoGenMo is to "spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words." In the NaNoGenMo world, a "novel" can be defined however the coder wants, so long as there are 50,000 words. One great example is a code that recreates famous novels using on the word "meow."

"But this isn't just "meow" 50,000 times," github user Hugovk wrote, "meow.py replaces all words with a meow of the same length, keeping punctuation."

Here is a line-by-line translation of The Jungle Book into only meows:

He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his
Me mew m meeoooow, meeeow meow m meeeow mew me mew mew mew mew

tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His
meow, mew meoow meow m meeeow me mew meow mew mew meeoow. Mew

eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch
meow mew mew mew me mew meooooow meow meow meow. Me meeow meeeoow

himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he
meeooow meeeeeow me meeooow meow mew mew, meeow me meow, meow me

chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a
meeow me mew. Me meoow meeow me mew meow meow me meeeow meow m

bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long
meeoow meeow, mew mew mew mew me me meeeeeow meeeoow mew meow

grass was: "Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!"
meoow mew: "Meow-meow-meeow-meoow-meow!"

Meow.py is a futuristic experiment. What is a novel? It asks. What is a word? We don't know, but meows are fun. It's time you exposed your cats to classic literature.

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