Dogeared

From "Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley, in the June 6, 2011 New Yorker (I detest this magazine but my husband subscribes, and clips the short stories for me. And I read them, as consolation for the fact that there are stacks of these f---ing magazines creating clutter all over my house. The New Yorker owes me a good f---ing story. Occasionally they deliver. Very occasionally. Pretentious motherf---ers.):

In a reasonable voice, he communicated his warnings about the meanness at the heart of things, which he understood and I, in my childishness, was refusing to acknowledge.

...

I didn't make the connection that Nor did, between the power of what I read in books in my own time and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.