They come to class expecting you to take them seriously and all you want to do is throw them nasty glances for totally missing the point and insulting everyone who did do the assignment.

From the New Yorker, a cornucopia of broad and sweeping negative generalizations about YA lit. However, I was pleased to find John Green in the comments, responding to the following comment:

“Well, of course we do demand of “great” writers—literary-fiction writers—higher moral and philosophical stakes. Like I said, I think the Y.A. genre is typically defined by very straightforward moral messages.”

Lo! John Green speaks polite, quiet, thoughtful wisdom of someone who has done his goddamn homework, unlike the majority of people in the article.

This is just dead wrong, and has been wrong for at least a decade. I find it disappointing that our best critical readers have been so unwilling to read Y.A. fiction, presuming that one has to sacrifice moral ambiguity and philosophical complexity in order to reach the audience—which, frankly, is just not true.

Dude, the more he shares his opinions on literature the bigger my crush gets on him. STOP IT, JOHN. If you get any more awesome I might spontaneously explode.