When I Look Back on All the Crap I Learned in High School, It's a Wonder I Can Think at All

On a warm afternoon, somewhere toward the end of tenth grade, I was sprawled on a couch in the windowless reading room within my high school's library halfway through this when the vice principal, an ex-Marine with spit-shined shoes poked his head in and said, "What are you reading that for? That's a pig book. You should read T.S. Eliot."

I don't know why I just remembered that.

(A "pig book"?)