人类在中世纪就已经开始寻求信息的移动化。袖珍书就是早期的移动设备。
氧分子科技 李斌 12月31日编译
在遥远的16世纪，古代翻译官约翰-库鲁克（John Croke）曾将一本圣诗（Psalms）翻译成了当代英文。而这本圣诗在随后被装订进了一个长1.6英寸、宽1.2英寸的袖珍本中，这个袖珍本的上方预留了2个小孔，因此该书可以十分方便被系在人们的腰带上。
这本书的首页中出现了一张当时英国国王亨利八世（Henry VIII）的图片，而这张图片几乎就是这本袖珍书的唯一风格。
对于许多人来说，这些遥远的袖珍书几乎已经从人们的日常生活中所消失，但来自圣地亚哥大学的学者玛格丽特-史密斯（Margit Smith）和剑桥大学图书馆（Cambridge University Library）的吉姆-博克斯拉姆（Jim Bloxam）就在一本名为《国际书记杂志》（The International Journal of the Book）的期刊中探讨了古代迷你书对于人们现代移动生活的意义所在。
史密斯和博克斯拉姆在文中写道：“当时各种各样不同风格的袖珍书拥有着几乎统一的外观设计，并为人们提供了携带、放置和保护书籍的最好方法。事实上，这些中世纪袖珍书背后的理念其实同诸如Palm Pilots、电子书和笔记本电脑等这些20世纪的科技产品并没有多大区别，因为以上这些产品的设计理念其实也在于便携性。所以，虽说古代的袖珍书对我们绝大多数人来说都已经十分陌生，但他们所蕴含的理念却依然具备现实意义。”
据史密斯和博克斯拉姆透露，在10-20世纪这将近一千年的时间内，袖珍书产业迎来了巨大发展，但如今现存的袖珍书数量却并不多。
事实上，美国《大西洋月刊》(TheAtlantic)此前也曾关注过袖珍书方面的话题，就比如康涅狄格州图书管理员卡罗琳-休伊斯（Caroline Hewins）在1888年所著的有关儿童书籍演化历史的《儿童书籍简史》（history of children’s books）一书。在这本书中，休伊斯谈到了有关诸如袖珍书、小孩学习用的文字板等早期“移动学习工具”。
休伊斯在文中写道：“小孩们有着非常充分的时间学习单词，而学习的渠道可以不仅仅局限于传统书籍，而同样可以来自诸如袖珍书、小孩学习用的文字板等工具。比如，一块源自1570年的学习用文字板可能仅仅拥有一页，但这一页中涵盖着所有英文字母、元音、单音节词和天主教的祷文等内容。文字板页面的上方有着一层透明的材质所保护，以防止用户的手弄湿纸质页面。而且，整个文字板都由木质材料所保护，并配有把手（有时可能是一个小孔）以方便用户取用。”
下图中便是普利茅斯种植园（Plimoth Plantation ）在当时推出的一个文字板。
应该说，从以上这一段有关古代袖珍书的历史中我们不难看出，一些“天生移动”的产品被“移动化”只是时间问题。而在即将到来的2014年，我相信将会有更多被移动化产品的出现。
The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
本年度最佳书籍，由《纽约时报》书评版编辑评选。
Fiction
虚构
《秋天》(Autumn)
阿里·史密斯(Ali Smith)著
The extraordinary friendship of an elderly songwriter and the precocious child of his single-parent neighbor is at the heart of this novel that darts back and forth through the decades, from the 1960s to the era of Brexit. The first in a projected four-volume series, it’s a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be.
从60年代到英国脱欧，这本小说在数十年间来回跳跃，核心围绕着一位年长的词曲作者和一个单亲家庭邻居的早熟孩子之间的不寻常友谊。本书是计划中的四卷本系列的第一部，是对想像力复杂性的动人探索，狡黠地揭示出许多宏大的观念和细微的启示，它们都围绕着一个永恒的困境：如何观察，如何存在。
《退出西方》(Exit West)
穆辛·哈米德(Mohsin Hamid)著
A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence. Hamid has written a novel that fuses the real with the surreal — perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet.
这是一部反映当下的小说，以看似简单的艺术手法，把一对逃离内战的夫妇的故事变成对流亡心理的深刻思考。一道道魔法之门将旧世界的已知灾难与新世界的未知风险分隔开来，而移民要调整自己，随机应变。哈米德的这本小说把真实与荒诞融为一体，要描写这个人们彼此密切相连的星球上震颤的政治裂痕，这或许是最忠实的一种方式。
《弹球盘》(Pachinko)
李敏金（Min Jin Lee，音）著
Lee’s stunning novel, her second, chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Exploring central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging, the book announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen.
这部精彩的小说是作者的第二部，讲述了一个韩国家族四代人的大事记，从20世纪初日本占领下的韩国开始，而后是二战前一直到1980年代末的日本。这本书探索了身份、故乡和归属感等核心问题，从开头的一句话就宣告了自己的抱负：“历史辜负了我们，但是没有关系。”李敏金认为，各式各样的人物表面之下都潜藏着无数私欲、希望与苦难，只要我们有耐心和同情心去观看和倾听。
《力量》(The Power)
娜奥米·奥尔德曼(Naomi Alderman)著
Alderman imagines our present moment — our history, our wars, our politics — complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss. Provocatively, Alderman suggests that history’s horrors are inescapable — that there will always be abuses of power, that the arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice so much as inscribe a circle away from it. “Transfers of power, of course, are rarely smooth,” one character observes.
奥尔德曼想像，女人突然能产生一种致命的“静电力”，从而颠覆了全球范围内的性别力量对比，令我们当下的时刻——我们的历史、我们的战争、我们的政治——变得更加复杂。本书语言精彩刺激，故事引人入胜，探讨权力如何腐蚀每个人：包括那些新获得权力的人和拼命维持权力的人。奥尔德曼认为，历史的恐怖是不可避免的——权力的滥用总会出现，宇宙的发展弧线不会向正义偏移，也无法绕过正义。书中一个角色指出：“当然，权力的转移很少是平稳的。”
《唱歌，尸魔，唱歌》(Sing Unburied Sing)
杰丝明·沃德(Jesmyn Ward)著
In her follow-up to “Salvage the Bones,” Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like “rural poor,” “drug-dependent,” “products of the criminal justice system.” Instead Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination.
继上一部小说《拯救遗骨》(Salvage the Bones)之后，沃德再度回到虚构的小镇——密西西比州的布瓦苏韦奇。讲述那些容易被归类为“农村穷人”、“药物依赖者”、“刑事司法系统的产物”的普通人的故事。她为我们带来的主人公是13岁的卓卓，吸毒的黑人母亲带着他和他的妹妹做了一场公路旅行，去接他们入狱的白人父亲。他们的生存非常艰难。他们的故事感觉很神秘，既有来自过去的幽灵，也涉及南方所有的种族与社会状态，它们全都在这个破碎的家庭中奔涌而过。沃德在小说中营造这种程度的共情，是现实生活中往往无法达到的，然而在这样一位充满诗意想象的作家笔下又显得那样真诚而自然，这是本书最大的成就。
Nonfiction
非虚构
《美的进化——达尔文被遗忘的择偶理论如何塑造动物世界乃至我们》(The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us)
理查德·O·普鲁姆(Richard O. Prum)著
If a science book can be subversive and feminist and change the way we look at our own bodies — but also be mostly about birds — this is it. Prum, an ornithologist, mounts a defense of Darwin’s second, largely overlooked theory of sexual selection. Darwin believed that, in addition to evolving to adapt to the environment, some other force must be at work shaping the species: the aesthetic mating choices made largely by the females. Prum wants subjectivity and the desire for beauty to be part of our understanding of how evolution works. It’s a passionate plea that begins with birds and ends with humans and will help you finally understand, among other things, how in the world we have an animal like the peacock.
如果一本科学书籍能做到有颠覆性，倡导女权主义，还能改变我们看待自己身体的方式，但同时主要还是关于鸟类的，那就是这本书了。普鲁姆是一位鸟类学家，他为达尔文的另一个基本上被忽略了的雌雄淘汰理论进行了辩护。达尔文认为，除了为适应环境而发生的进化外，肯定还有其他某种力量在发挥作用，塑造物种：主要由雌性做出的受审美影响的配偶选择。普鲁姆希望将主观性和对美的渴望纳入到我们对进化作用的理解中去。这是一个充满热情的请求，从鸟类开始，以人类结束。本书会帮助你最终理解许多问题，比如世界上为什么会有孔雀这样的动物。
《格兰特》(Grant)
罗恩·切尔瑙(Ron Chernow)著
Even those who think they are familiar with Ulysses S. Grant’s career will learn something from Chernow’s fascinating and comprehensive biography, especially about Grant’s often overlooked achievements as president. What is more, at a time of economic inequality reflecting the 19th century’s Gilded Age and a renewed threat from white-supremacy groups, Chernow reminds us that Grant’s courageous example is more valuable than ever, and in this sense, “Grant” is as much a mirror on our own time as a history lesson.
即便是那些自认为通晓尤利西斯·S·格兰特(Ulysses S. Grant)生涯的人，也会从切尔瑙这本精彩且全面的传记中有所收获，尤其是关于格兰特担任总统期间的成就。它们经常被忽略。更重要的是，在令人想起19世纪的镀金时代(Gilded Age)的经济不平等和白人至上团体的威胁死灰复燃的背景下，切尔瑙提醒我们，格兰特勇敢的榜样比以往任何时候都更宝贵，并且从这个角度来说，《格兰特》既是我们这个时代的一面镜子，也是我们的历史经验。
《把自己人关起来——美国黑人的罪与罚》(Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America)
小詹姆斯·福尔曼(James Forman Jr.)著
A former public defender in Washington, Forman has written a masterly account of how a generation of black officials, beginning in the 1970s, wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation’s capital. What started out as an effort to assert the value of black lives turned into an embrace of tough-on-crime policies — with devastating consequences for the very communities those officials had promised to represent. Forman argues that dismantling the American system of mass incarceration will require a new understanding of justice, one that emphasizes accountability instead of vengeance.
作为一名前华盛顿公设辩护人，福尔曼以娴熟的手法记述了从70年代开始，一代黑人官员如何奋力解决美国首都反复出现的暴力和毒品危机。一开始是一场意在彰显黑人生命价值的行动，后来演变成了严厉打击犯罪的政策，给这些官员本来承诺代表的社区造成了毁灭性的后果。福尔曼认为，废除美国大规模监禁制度需要重新理解正义。后者强调的是责任而不是复仇。
《草原之火——劳拉·英戈尔斯·怀尔德的美国梦》(Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder)
卡罗琳·弗雷泽(Caroline Fraser)著
Fraser’s biography of the author of “Little House on the Prairie” and other beloved books about her childhood during the era of westward migration captures the details of a life — and an improbable, iconic literary career — that has been expertly veiled by fiction. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, this book refreshes and revitalizes our understanding of Western American history, giving space to the stories of Native Americans displaced from the tribal lands by white settlers like the Ingalls family as well as to the travails of homesteaders, farmers and everyone else who rushed to the West to extract its often elusive riches. Ending with a savvy analysis of the 20th-century turn toward right-wing politics taken by Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Fraser offers a remarkably wide-angle view of how national myths are shaped.
这本传记的主人公的作品包括《草原小屋》(Little House on the Prairie)和其他一些回忆作者在西迁时期的童年生活的作品。弗雷泽捕捉到了这位作家被虚构作品巧妙掩盖的生活，和一段不可思议的标志性文学生涯的细节。本书做了全面的研究，字里行间洋溢着热情，刷新了我们对美国西部历史的理解，也为讲述其他人的故事提供了空间，这其中有英戈尔斯家这样将美国原住民从部落领地赶走的白人定居者，也有公地开垦者、农场主和其他所有冲着这里难以捉摸的财富而来的人。结尾处，弗雷泽对怀尔德和女儿罗丝·怀尔德·莱恩(Rose Wilder Lane)在20世纪转向右翼政治进行了颇有见地的分析，为思考国家神话是如何形成的提供了一个非常广阔的角度。
《神父老爸》(Priestdaddy)
帕特丽夏·洛克伍德(Patricia Lockwood)著
In this affectionate and very funny memoir, Lockwood weaves the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with her own coming-of-age, and the crisis that later led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. She also brings to bear her gifts as a poet, mixing the sacred and profane in a voice that’s wonderfully grounded and authentic. This book proves Lockwood to be a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.
在这本深情而又十分有趣的回忆录里，洛克伍德将她家族的故事——包括她的父亲，一位获得梵蒂冈特批豁免的罗马天主教神父——和她自己的成长，以及一场导致她和丈夫被迫暂时进入神父居所与父母同住的危机——穿织成了一个故事。她还运用诗人的天赋，将神圣和粗俗融入到一个让人信服而又纯正的美妙声音之中。通过这本书，洛克伍德证明了她是一位极具天赋、能够随心所欲的作家。
翻译：纽约时报中文网