"His habit of reading isolated him: it became such a need that after being in company for some time he grew tired and restless; he was vain of the wider knowledge he had acquired from the perusal of so many books, his mind was alert, and he had not the skill to hide his contempt for his companions' stupidity. They complained that he was conceited; and, since he excelled only in matters which to them were unimportant, they asked satirically what he had to be conceited about."

-- I feel you, Philip. That is, Philip Carey in W. Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel Of Human Bondage. It may have taken me 43 years to get around to reading this book, but that beats never managing to get to it then dying of cancer/heart disease/car accident/shark nibbles/lethal rejection/brain analism/worm stuff/the pox/SIDS/etc. Stripped of the ornate verbosity endemic to many novels of the era, Maugham's prose has a very modern fluidity and his understanding of his characters (and considerable humor) make the lengthy novel (607 tiny-type pages in my early '80s orange-spine Penguin edition) flow while entrancing the reader. Bully!