Since our plane has been delayed (Jewish luck!), I can share funny stories.
Back in grad school, people kept sharing the only bit of knowledge they had about Ukrainians which was that we were all alcoholics. I’m from a completely non-drinking family, so the discussions of “you people drink so much” started getting on my nerves. One day I finally snapped.

“Yes, I was conceived in a drunken stupor,” I said. “This is why I ended up here at Yale. Just to think how much better I could have done were my parents not such hopeless drunks.”

At the airport restaurant we were offered to breakfast on mimosas at 6 am.

“Nobody is that Russian,” I said to N.

My vacation begins now, people. Not to worry, though, I have many great posts scheduled. And I hear that the wi-fi works quite well at my DR resort, so I will be bugging you with posts all the time.

P.S. I haven’t had a chance to recover comments that were lost yesterday but I promise to do that soon. They have not been lost.

I think this entire idea that there is something called “young adult literature” is completely bizarre. Teenagers are perfectly equipped to read and enjoy the same books that adults read. When I was 12-18 years of age, I really loved books by Balzac, Elsa Triolet, Maupassant, Hans Fallada, Leon Feuchtwanger, John Galsworthy. (No Spanish authors because, in the Soviet Union, we pretended that the Spanish-speaking world was not in existence.)

I see the creation of this spurious distinction between “adult literature” and “young adult literature” as an attempt to infantilize teenagers emotionally and intellectually.