You are allowed to have been right about the reading.
That is the part you keep stepping over, because saying it sounds like vanity.

Fourteen months in a chair was not wasted, and it was not the work either.
It was raw material, and it sat in a heap for two years
until enough repetitions came through the yard to make it into anything.
Say it accurately: you did not abandon the study. You finally spent it.

The Book of the Scholar — Return 42:7