Disclaimer: This is me sharing my personal experiences and my take on them. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I’m not judging anyone who has had a different experience. | Links to collection & social media are at the end of the post.
Nothing epic, deep, or dark here: I just love books. I learned to read very early, and ever since I remember, books have been a source of entertainment and knowledge for me. I may have switched to mostly electronic and audio-books in the last few years, but the love is not for the paper — it’s for the medium.
I learned to read by the age of four, and not just by syllable but «fully fledged reading». I’m not some kind of a kid genius — I may have had a bit of a talent for it, but it mostly came from my mom investing a lot of her time in my development, including teaching me to read.
Although extroverted, I was also a kid who got easily engrossed in whatever she was doing. And after I learned to read, you could basically give me a book and leave me alone for hours.
And that is mostly it for the story :) Okay, I’m kind of kidding (but also kind of not).
I read a lot in my teens — and, there being no modern TV shows and no Internet (for more than half of my teenage years), this has been one of my chief pastimes. However, I didn’t really enjoy reading textbooks or school program literature.
At the university, there were way more textbooks to read (they were often more fun than school ones, though)— but there were also classed devoted to reading English language fiction, analyzing it and its vocabulary, discussing it, etc, so there was always at least some place for reading fiction.
During the first year of university, I began reading in English with the same ease I could read in Russian, which felt like a really cool achievement. Somehow I never reached that level of comfort with German (my second foreign language), although at some point I had a very good command of it.
At some point during my student years I discovered the audio-book + crafting/making art combo which I frequently use to this day. Last year I got a Scribd subscription, which was quite timely as I also started doing quite a lot of embroidery at about the same time, and for me, embroidery goes amazingly with audio-books.
After graduating from the university, I started learning Spanish because I wanted to read a few Spanish authors in the original. Still haven’t read them, though, — but I do speak a bit of Spanish now, at about intermediate level.
I also started learning a bunch of different stuff using various teach-yourself books and resources. Books contributed to my learning how to play the guitar, improving my art and my writing, broadening my horizons on a variety of topics.
Gradually, with the development of technology, I started reading more and more electronic books.
I still love the paper ones. The smell, the touch and sound of the pages… But I’m also a very pragmatic person, at least in some areas. Electronic books are lighter, cheaper, often compatible with electronic dictionaries… For a person who is often reading multiple books at the same time, in a few different languages, all those have been very useful.
And don’t even get me started on book subscriptions! I’m not paid by Scribd, I just share what I use and like: it has both audio-books and regular electronic books, and I feel like I have already made the most of my yearly subscription — and there are still a few months to go.
I have also kind of sort of written a book — even a couple of books — but that’s a subject for another mask.
And now that’s mostly it. I love books. I read quite a lot, although usually in bursts with periods of being distracted by other stuff. I read fiction and non-fiction. What else there is to say? :)
Now onto the mask.
Like all the masks in the collection, it has a paper mache base (you can read about me making it here and here).
At first, I wanted to glue book pages to it, but I couldn’t bring myself to destroy another one, even an old second-hand one. To create the Bilingual Mask, I already destroyed a dictionary — well, I used only a few pages but the whole dictionary is technically destroyed. I decided to use a few more pages from the same dictionary to decorate this mask.
The pages are folded and then glued to the base.
This is the second mask where I forgot to cut the eyes out (the first one is the Gilded Trash mask), but I realized it mid-way — and cut one out after all, as at least one eye peeking from the pages made sense.
For the photo I grabbed one of the very few paper books I still have at home (I gave most of mine away as I hardly ever re-read books but they could still bring some joy to others).
And that is it for this mask — but feel free to ask questions, here or on Twitter.
Thank you for reading!
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