New Year, Old Books

One of my many resolutions for the New Year is to try to bring this blog back to life, even if in a slightly different form. I'm going to try (ah, hostage to fortune!) to write more, rather than simply posting pictures and links, although I suppose pictures and links are pretty and informative on certain levels. The blog died away a little bit in 2014 for two main reasons: first, because I've been doing a lot more work this last year, which has mean that I have had less time to post things, and secondly, my general postage and linkage has migrated almost entirely to Facebook. So from now on Trunt will try to have slightly longer posts with a little more effort put into them. Oh well, it's an experiment, and if it doesn't work then I'll think about something a little different later on down the line. Anyway, today is slightly cheating: one final post (pictures and links!) of the books I liked the most in 2014. Five books I'd never read before, plus one I reread with more pleasure than I read it the first time. Maybe the first few steps into longer-form writing will be to say a little bit more about why I liked these books so much. Promises, promises…

Jacqueline Harpman, The Mistress of Silence (Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, 1995, trans. Ros Schwartz 1997). More about Harpman here (in French).

Sophie Calle, Fantômes (2013). More about Calle here (in French). 

Steve Ely, Oswald's Book of Hours (2013). More about Ely here.

Bengt Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky: A Biography (Med livet som insats, 2007, trans. Harry D. Watson 2014). More information about Jangfeldt here (in Swedish). My review of the book in the Literary Review here.

Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic, Ein Ghetto im Osten-Wilna (1931). More information about Raviv-Vorobeichic here.

Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian). More about Spicer here.