Winter is imminent, for summer time suddenly ended last week. My mood these days is just as sombre as the weather. The sky is despondently dim, even at noon. All surroundings are hemmed in the depression of drizzles here and there; humidity and chill constitute the common motif of this brooding season. The boundary between day and night is then blurred. Darkness seems to engulf everything very early.
Finding no reason to go out, I immured myself in my room for days. This is different from home where there are several magazine kiosks nearby which I am wont to visit from time to time. Although various newspapers are sold in a WHSmith within five minutes’ walk to my house, there is still not enough momentum for me to take a step. In the eyes of a poor student, most local qualities are exorbitant, whose prices roughly amount to 1/10 of an ordinary paperback. What’s more, the advertisements are as many as the real content. And I have a Kindle, with which I can download news or book reviews at my fingertips. My housemate’s habit of buying broadsheet every day adds another reason preventing me from outdoor exercises. But life is stuffy in the poky little room laden with stale air. So I read books all the day, while forcing myself to do some research on job hunting, my top priority at the moment. The whole process is excruciatingly painful, but I garnish it with a little joy by flipping through several pages of an atlas on world history I bought recently. The book, the Times Complete History of the World, is an authoritative atlas in its field talking about the general history of human civilization by means of hundreds of exquisite maps on every nook and cranny in a span of millions of years. From the origin of Homo sapiens to the Second World War, from the development of agriculture in Fertile Crescent to the modern superpower, this book demonstrates a vivid and informative graph of a comprehensive evolution of human society. I found that this book was previously translated into Chinese in the 1980s and its new version just came out last month. The price of the old version is now driven up to a whopping 2,000 yuan, which is rather incredible. With a SRP of £75, this last version only cost me £18 at WHSmith. But the knotty thing is how can I carry this ponderous tome back to Shanghai?