coffee, kindness, lots of books

Right, so this is an important thing for readers to know how to do, esp. if you like the convenience of a Kindle but don’t want to be putting any more money in Amazon’s pockets.

There are several ways to do this but the first thing you need to do is find out what your unique Kindle email is. In order to do this:

Log into your Amazon account.

Click on ‘Your Account,’ then scroll down to click on ‘Manage Your Content and Devices.’

Click on the 'Your Devices’ tab in the middle. Under the heading for your Kindle (mine is called Edgar) you will see Email: [email protected]. 

Now, listen up because this part is important. This is not the only Kindle email you have. This is your main one, but what Amazon doesn’t tell you (because they’re sneaky, sneaky bastards) is that it may charge you like $0.15 per email to download stuff to your Kindle if it (a) didn’t come from them or (b) you don’t have wifi. In order to prevent this, the email address you actually want to use is exactly the samea s the one Amazon gives you, but instead of @kindle.com, you want it to be @free.kindle.com, which will force your Kindle to only download from that email when you have Wifi, and as a personal document, so it won’t cost you anything. 

Cool, that’s step one. 

Step Two:

Back up at the top of the 'Manage Your Content and Devices’ page, click on the far right 'Settings’ tab. 

Scroll down until you see the heading 'Personal Document Settings.’ Under that, there will be a bit that says 'Approved Personal Document Email List.’

Click where is says ’Add a new approved e-mail address,’ and type in whatever your usual email is. 

So, now you can send literally any document to your Kindle, just by emailing your [email protected] account from whatever your approved email address is, with the the document attached. 

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly, totally that simple. The Kindle only supports certain types of ebook files, so you have to make sure you’re sending them as mobi files (or AZW). You may want to download an ebook converter - I recommend Calibre, which lets you do all kinds of nifty things, like turning Word docs or RTF into various ebook formats (and it’s free!)

If that’s too high tech for you, never fear. There’s an abundance of free ebooks (classics mostly because of copyright issues) available on Project Gutenberg. And, as you can see, this is also the best way to get your free reading from NetGalley. And if you learn how the conversion process works, you can make your own ebooks as well (I did this recently for my own manuscript and a script I’m using in rehearsal, so I don’t have to carry a massive binder when I’m onstage for blocking). 

02.12.2017

What my “semester break study sessions” consist of summed up in four pictures: Purple - Reviewed Accounting Principles 1 Green - Reviewed Management Accounting 1 Pink - Reviewed both Intermediate Accounting 1&2 Blue - Learning Japanese by myself with the help of Genki and Kanji Damage.

A few basics… 

Medieval

Beowulf

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Le Morte d’Arthur, Mallory

Early Modern

Hamlet, Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare

Macbeth, Shakespeare

Doctor Faustus, Marlowe

Modern – 19th Century

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Middlemarch, George Eliot

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

Modern – 20th Century

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

Howards End, E.M. Forster

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Contemporary

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

first off, let’s get some shit straight. i hate waking up. i fucking hate it. at any given moment in my life, there is a 93% chance that i would rather be asleep. that being said, becoming an early riser when i started graduate school was the best thing i’ve ever done for myself and for my productivity. so an alternate title for this post could be 

HOW TO TRICK YOUR BODY INTO GETTING VERTICAL AND STAYING THAT WAY AT AN HONESTLY UNREASONABLE HOUR.

put your alarm someplace far, far away from your bed. when i was in undergrad and i really had to get up for something important, i used to put my phone in a box on top of my dresser. in order to turn it off i had to get out of bed, drag a chair over to the dresser, stand on the chair, and open the box before i could shut it off. this required way more in the way of motor skills than just rolling over in bed and swiping the screen. this is an extreme example. now that i’m an “adult,” i put it just far enough away from the bed that i need to walk to it. other, saner options include apps that require you to solve a math problem or a puzzle, but in all honesty, i’ve tried those and just rolled over and passed back out anyway.

pick a wake-up time and stick to it. mine is anywhere between 6:30 and 7:00 (which, I know, is not that early for those of you in high school, and believe me when i say i am so sorry). eventually your body will begin waking up at that time by itself, which is kind of horrific, but which also makes your life a lot easier. my advice is to gradually work your way towards that time, in 15- or 30-minute increments. on the weekends, when i stay in bed until 8 or 9, i feel like a goddamn kardashian. height of luxury.

have some early-morning jams ready. here are some playlists i love, or you can pick one song for the week. i’ve been using this one. on the days i’m feeling particularly daring i let myself lie back in bed until the song’s over, and then i get up. this is pretty dangerous, though, so use cautiously.

drink water. you can do this when you wake up, like all the fitblrs tell you. or you can do what i do, which is to drink between 8 and 12 ounces immediately before going to bed, so that when my alarm goes off my first thought is how badly i need to pee. unless you’ve got some ongoing health issues, that usually requires you to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. 

open all your blinds before you go to bed. i know, this seems counter-intuitive. but i’ve got a roommate who has those fancy light-blocking curtains and i never see her before 10:00. i, on the other hand, have an entire wall of windows and no curtains, just broken blinds circa 1980, and am up earlier than god himself. i’m not saying these things are related, but i think the facts speak for themselves.

in an emergency: early morning flight? time for a nap after an almost-all-nighter? make the alarm harder to get to, sleep with the light on, or have a friend or parent in another time zone call you to make sure you’re awake.

(Continues) i was saying, sorry if you answered this already, I tried to browse through your tags but couldn’t find a similar question. Also I wanted to tell you that I’m outlining following your suggestion on how important that is! So thank you for always being this awesome. All the best x x

*Curtsies* Your options are either to take classes or self-teach. That’s pretty much it. History and literature are very different fields and personally I can’t speak to history except to suggest keeping an eye on academic presses and what they’re putting out, because that’s where the most cutting-edge ideas are going to be. Find something interesting? Great, mine that article’s bibliography to see what else might be up your street. As for staying involved in the book world: I can’t really tell if you’re talking about more literary studies or contemporary publishing here. If the former, it’s going to be largely similar to what I said about history, but I would add to it the suggestion that you get your hands on Norton or other academic anthologies for the movements/periods you’re interested in, because that will give you a good sense of what’s important and what you ought to read more of/next. If you’re talking about contemporary publishing, your best options are going to be (1) keeping up with major review sources, like the NYT and Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, (2) sign up for Shelf Awareness and similar publications, spot-check Publisher’s Lunch if you really want to get ahead of the curve, and (3) follow your favorite authors and publishers who publish the kind of stuff you’re interested in on social media, because that’s where a lot of the word goes out. 

27.03.17 // Sunshine and birdsong

AP European History Masterpost!

It’s that time of year. The AP exams are almost a month away. There are exactly 45 days until the AP European History exam. As a former student myself, I somehow got it into my mind that my advice was, for whatever reason, useful. A couple of disclosures before you read too far into it: I had a wonderful teacher for my AP Euro class alongside two great textbooks. My experience is purely based on the support these two–well, three–gave me, in addition to the Barron’s review book I was able to buy. I received a 5 on the exam, though I chalk that up mostly to the fact that I received relatively easy essay prompts in comparison to some of my peers. 

All that being said, let’s get into it!

10.03.2018

“Some days are for falling in love with people, some days for cities, and some for your time in solitude.” - Akif Kichloo