BBC推薦：12月最值得看的10本書

BBC推薦了10本12月必讀書目，每一本都是最近剛出版的，很值得一讀。但因爲比較新，暫時還沒有書名的中文翻譯哦。

stmas Days（作者：Jeanette Winterson）

Award-winning author Winterson’s celebration of the 12 Days of Christmas is a surprising and cheering addition to her work (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit). She gathers a dozen, sometimes eerie, holiday-themed stories, which range from otherworldly to magical. Winterson follows each with detailed instructions on how to make such traditional treats as mince pie (her mother’s specialty), her dad’s sherry trifle, her wife Susie Orbach’s Christmas Eve gravlax, and recipes from author friends, like Ruth Rendell’s red cabbage and Kamila Shamsie’s turkey biryani. A delectable read for long winter nights.
Christmas Days無疑是溫特森繼《橘子不是唯一的水果》等著作後的又一驚喜之作。該書收集了一些怪誕的聖誕節故事，譬如一些超現實的和與魔法有關的故事。每一則故事後都有溫特森關於如何製作聖誕節點心的小貼士，譬如：肉餡餅，他爸爸喜歡的sherry triple，她妻子愛做的平安夜漬鮭魚片等，還有很多菜單是由她的朋友提供的。

Glass Universe（作者：Dava Sobel）

Sobel begins her chronicle of pioneering women in astrophysics in 1882, when Anna Palmer Draper hosted a National Academy of Sciences dinner party. Her husband Henry was an astronomer credited with a method of classifying the stars, and she was his frequent assistant. When he died days later, Anna Draper funded a project at the Harvard Observatory to solidify her husband’s catalogue. She also created and funded a decades-long opportunity for women in the field. Working with the glass photographic plates their male colleagues used to capture images from the night sky, these “women with a knack for figures” calculated star positions, relative brightness, motion, and chemical content. The many luminaries Sobel profiles include Annie Jump Cannon, who devised Harvard’s stellar classification system and evaluated some half a million stars.
該書是關於安娜·德雷伯從的一部傳記。安娜的丈夫亨利·德雷伯是一位頗具聲譽的天文學家。1882年，德雷伯因肺炎去世，終年45歲。去世後，安娜設立了亨利·德雷伯獎章，獎勵在天文學上做出傑出貢獻的人。她還資助了哈佛大學天文臺的愛德華·皮克林、安妮·坎農等人編制收錄恆星光譜的亨利·德雷伯星表。月球上的德雷伯環形山也以他的姓氏命名。

Gardens of Consolation（作者：Parisa Reza）

This illuminating and lyrical first novel by Iranian-born Reza, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, won France’s Prix Senghor. Reza follows a young couple as they travel from their ancestral village of Ghamsar to Shemiran on the outskirts of Tehran in the early days of the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Their son Bahram becomes the first from his village to graduate from high school, and is admitted to university in Tehran. Reza tracks the massive changes of World War Two, when the Allies and Russia invaded oil-rich Iran, and the mid-century turmoil of the early Cold War and the coup against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. She never loses track of her intimate focus on one family whose lives are shaped by love, loyalty, tradition, and the continual adjustments required as political power shifts.
這本具有啓發性、感情豐富的作品是伊朗籍作家Reza的第一部小說。Reza跟蹤觀察了一對從格哈默沙村莊遷移到賽米蘭（位於德黑蘭邊界）年輕夫婦。他們的兒子巴赫拉姆是村子裏第一個高中畢業生，並被德黑蘭大學錄取。伊朗在二戰期間被協約國和俄國侵略，在冷戰初期遭遇浩劫以及穆罕默德·摩薩臺政變。Reza努力去追尋這些事件對伊朗造成的改變，同時她也密切關注着由愛、忠貞和傳統構成，但面對政局動盪不得不做出改變的平凡家庭。

emeat（作者：Leonardo Lucarelli）

Lucarelli begins working in kitchens as a 25-year-old paying his way through university. Early on, he begins “recklessly concocting insane desserts… like chocolate-and-eggplant strudel.” His goal is not to become a celebrity chef, but to indulge his passion for cooking and support himself. He works in small restaurants in Rome, Tuscany, the Veneto and Bologna. His wages are often weeks late and his ultimate salary uncertain. In his enthralling memoir, translated from the Italian by Lorena Rossi Gori and Danielle Rossi, he takes us through long, sensual after-hours escapades as well as the satisfactions of learning on the job and cooking up his own fantasies. Most revealing, perhaps, are his mistakes: underestimating his rivals, testing the power of the head chef, gossiping to people he shouldn’t have trusted, arrogance. “Life in the restaurant business was a constant battle,” he writes. “There is always a loser…”
Lucarelli爲了賺錢上大學，25歲的他開啓了廚師生涯。最開始，他製作了很多黑暗料理，譬如：巧克力茄子夾心餅。他並不想成爲一名明星廚師，只是希望可以寄望於廚藝然後賺些錢。他在意大利的很多小餐廳打過工，老闆經常拖欠他的薪水，他一年到頭能拿到多少錢也是未知的。在他的回憶錄中，他帶我們回憶了他有趣但又市儈的工作、在工作中學到的人情世故和他自己鑽研出來的廚藝。最具啓發性的應該是他所犯的一些錯誤，譬如低估對手、試探廚師長的廚藝、與他本不該信任的人八卦以及驕傲自大。他在書中寫到：“餐飲生意就是無盡的戰役，總有人會被打敗.”

ge Lucas: A Life（作者：Brian Jay Jones）

As a film student at the University of Southern California in 1965, George Lucas was a rule-breaker. Influenced by cinema-vérité, he produced “visual tone poems” with potent sound tracks. His early days in Los Angeles were shaped by peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. In this engaging biography, Jones captures the bone-crushing work, the frustrations with film studio overlords and the near failures that resulted in ground-breaking films like American Graffiti and Star Wars. As he traces three decades of Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, he shows Lucas as a man continuing to revolt against the rules, inventing his own merchandising approach and pioneering digital technology to maintain his artistic freedom.
作爲南加利福尼亞大學1965年電影系學生，George Lucas從未循規蹈矩地生活過。他在洛杉磯的早期生活，很大程度受到Francis Ford Coppola和Steven Spielberg的影響。在這部引人入勝的傳記電影中，導演瓊斯着眼於George Lucas的核心作品，他與電影公司交涉過程中的絕望，以及如《美國風情畫》《星球大戰》等驚世駭俗作品幾近夭折的故事。在導演回顧George《星球大戰》三部曲和《奪寶奇兵》三部曲時，他呈現了George爲了追求藝術自由而反抗俗套、尋找全新的電影宣傳方法以及探索領先數碼技術的不屈精神。

Feud（作者：Alex Beam）

Leading literary critic Edmund Wilson lent a hand to Vladimir Nabokov when he arrived in the US in 1940, assigning him reviews and introducing him to other editors. The two exchanged fond letters for some 25 years. But as Beam makes clear in this spirited account of a bitter if sometimes silly rivalry, their career trajectories shifted in the mid-1950s. Nabokov’s Lolita brought him international recognition and a goodly fortune, just as Wilson’s star was on the wane. In 1964 Nabokov published an idiosyncratic translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin with 930 pages of notes. The feud erupted when Wilson savaged the book in the New York Review of Books in “an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job” that set the tone for “seven-plus years of malicious rhetoric.”
1949年，Vladimir Nabokov到達美國，知名評論人Edmund Wilson向其伸出援手，安排他的工作並介紹編輯給他認識。兩人通過書信維持友誼長達25年之久。在20世紀50年代中期，兩位摯友的事業軌跡發生了變化。Nabokov因作品Lolita而名聲大噪，而Wilson的事業則逐漸走向下坡。1964年Nabokov發表了一篇930頁的普希金《葉甫蓋尼·奧涅金》翻譯作品，兩人長達七年之久的文字對戰便由Wilson在New York Review猛烈抨擊這篇翻譯作品拉開了帷幕。

7.A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women（作者：Siri Hustvedt）

This provocative essay collection from Hustvedt, whose novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, draws insights from both the sciences and the humanities. Her title comes from her first section, 11 essays on individual artists , explorations of “the perceptual biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general” and her personal experience with psychoanalysis. The lengthy Delusions of Certainty section focuses on the mind/body split as perceived by thinkers from Descartes to Simone Weil to Stephen Pinker. She begins her concluding essays, which cover intriguing neurological disorders, with such questions as “What is a person, a self?” and “What is a mind?””
這部著作從科學和人性兩個角度獲取靈感。書的標題來自於該書的第一部分，該章節從11位藝術家入手，探討認知偏見是如何影響我們對於藝術、文學和世界的整體認知的。The lengthy Delusions of Certainty章節則闡述思想家勒內·笛卡爾、西蒙娜·韋伊、史蒂文·平克關於心智與肉體分離的觀點。最後的總結章節從複雜的精神紊亂入手，並提出了“人是什麼，自我是什麼，心智又是什麼？”這樣的疑問。

nicle of the Murdered House（作者：Lúcio Cardoso）

The setting and themes of this 1959 Brazilian novel by an author who was close to Clarice Lispector are “redolent of Faulkner”, writes Benjamin Moser in his introduction, “but its charm resides in the ways Lúcio marries those themes to what can only be called camp: as if Bette Davis had wandered, bewigged and in full makeup, into Yoknapatawpha.” His story, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Juli Costa and Robin Patterson, unfolds in a crumbling mansion in Minas Gerais, as the three remaining sons of the fading Meneses family – Valdo, Demetrio and Timoteo – struggle for dominance. The family’s secrets, many revolving around the arrival of Valdo’s seductive wife Nina, are revealed slowly through a series of documents – diaries, letters, confessions, and reports from the town doctor, pharmacist and priest. It’s a sensuous, bewitching tale, suspenseful to the last page.
這部寫於1959年的巴西小說的主題和設定會讓人聯想起作者威廉·福克納。但是作者Lúcio的寫作手法非常新奇，故事以巴西東部米納斯吉拉斯州的一個破舊的老房子展開。故事的主人公是梅內塞斯家族的三個爲了權利而鬥爭的兒子，Valdo, Demetrio和Timoteo。家族的祕密也因爲Valdo的妻子的到來而逐漸被解開。日記、信件、懺悔、鎮上醫生的診斷、藥劑師和牧師都使得事件變得撲朔迷離。這部作品直到最後一頁都令人着迷且提心吊膽。

i Moshi（作者：Banana Yoshimoto）

Yoshie’s father, a rock musician, has died in a “love murder-suicide”, lured to a forest and drugged by a woman she and her mother knew nothing about. After months of grieving with her mother, Yoshie moves to Shimokitazawa, finds an apartment and a job in a bistro. Then her mother shows up and says she is moving in because their Meguro condo is haunted by her late husband’s ghost. Yoshie dreams about her father and the cell phone he left behind the last time she saw him. She starts to fall for a musician who knew him. As this ghost story becomes a love story, best-selling Japanese author Yoshimoto’s buoyant tone and pleasurable descriptions, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, usher in Yoshie’s return to life.
主人公Yoshie的爸爸是一名搖滾音樂家，被一個女人引誘到樹林中，下藥殺害並僞裝成“殉情”。主人公和她的媽媽對此全然不知。幾個月後，Yoshie離開老家落腳於下北澤，在一家小酒館打工。沒過多久，她的母親來找她和她說老家因父親去世而鬧鬼，並提出要和她在下北澤一起生活。Yoshie夢見了她父親和她最後一次見到父親時他遺落的手機。不久，她愛上了爸爸的舊相識。這個驚悚故事逐漸發展成愛情故事。日本人氣作家吉本芭娜娜華麗的辭藻和生動的敘述使得這本書非常有看點。

al（作者：Warren Ellis）

Tech savvy Ellis’ new dystopian novel is a heart-pounding race through a digital nightmare. Adam, a futurist who has done legendary work on drones, has a meltdown in Namibia and finds himself flown to Normal Head, a mental asylum in a remote forested area in Oregon with no internet access. Each of his fellow futurist inmates seems to have walked through a worst-case scenario and ended shattered from gazing into the abyss. The morning after Adam arrives, another new patient disappears from his locked room, leaving behind a heaving pile of insects. Adam is suspect number one. And he also becomes the investigator, gathering an unlikely group of allies to take on a conspiracy that could destroy all that is “normal” in the pre-surveillance universe. Normal is crisply plotted and eerily timely.
科技狂人Ellis最新反烏托邦小說帶你走進驚悚的數碼噩夢。主人公Adam是一個未來主義者，對無人機的研究頗有建樹。一次他在納米比亞共和國發生事故，清醒時發現自己被水流衝到了一個叫做“正常大腦”的地方，這是一個沒有互聯網的坐落於叢林深處的精神療養所。他的每一個未來主義夥伴似乎都經歷過巨大的磨難，然後被所見到的痛苦擊碎。在Adam到達這裏的那日清晨，一位被鎖在房間裏的新病人消失了，只留下一袋蟲子。Adam的嫌疑最大，同事他也成了這個事件的調查者，他聯合了一羣看似完全不搭的同盟試圖擊垮這個主導“正常”的場所。