The Illnesses of Life

1. Can be read in three groups—physical illness, mental illness, social illness—to compare differences in approach.
2. For each piece, first observe how the author moves from a specific ailment into discussion, and appreciate the structure of Republican-era prose.
3. Choose several pieces to compare with present-day experience, and write down your own “view from illness” to deepen the reading experience.
4. Use it as bedside or commute reading, one or two pieces at a time, to avoid losing the distinctiveness of each piece through reading it all at once.

Peking University Press is a comprehensive university press whose publishing areas cover classical literature, popular science, social culture, world history, Western philosophy, and culture. Its catalogue contains 6,031 titles, with representative books including A Dream of Red Mansions, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (15th Edition) (with Einstein's classic papers on unified field theory and other topics), Elements, Conics, The Aristocratic Families of the Eastern Jin, The Philosophy of Mythology (Volume I), The Philosophy of Mythology (Volume II), and The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Representative authors include Cao Xueqin, Zhou Ruchang, Albert Einstein, Euclid, Apollonius, Tian Yuqing, Schelling, and Xian Gang. The press has developed distinctive strengths in classical Chinese literature and in the translation of Western philosophical classics, while also covering scientific classics and social and cultural studies. As public information is limited, this description is based only on the books in the catalogue and offers no further extrapolation.