Christmas came early this year.

I received my Christmas present from my boyfriend very early this year. When the Kindle went international, he decided to buy me one! It is an incredibly elegant little thing and the electronic ink is truly impressive. The only thing I am now waiting for is the Unicode hack for the international Kindle! It is incredible that they would release an international version and still not include Unicode on it. Scandalous even, but I guess that's what Anglo-mania is all about. I mean seriously, who needs any other language than English?

Once I get this high tech toy to read Cyrillic, my literary exploits shall know no limits! I really want to read all the huge Russian classics, but finding the actual books is always an obstacle and everyone who knows me knows that I don't really like to read on the computer. Of course Amazon has no e-books in any other languages than English available, but since the Kindle can read simple text documents and since you can't convert files, nothing is easier than acquiring all the old Russian classics. Right now I have a large number of works by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in English on my Kindle (the very kind boyfriend was thoughtful enough to load it with those) and as soon as I get some free time I am going to read something :-)

One really neat feature is that with the inbuilt English dictionary you can look up any word in the text you are reading by somehow clicking on it (I'm not really sure exactly how it works, sometimes I have to click around a bit before I get the translation, but once I get it going it seems to be working just fine... perhaps I should stop playing "male" and actually read some instructions on how to use it :-)) and this just opens up extremely interesting possibilities for the future. You know, that future when this thing is actually international and not just pseudo-international. Reading Russian texts with an inbuilt Russian dictionary... a girl can always dream!