About The Five Books

An online course platform where you engage with one book through a researcher's lectures and questions.

The Five Books is a service where you can attend online courses by researchers and experts while slowly reading through one book under their guidance. Long-enduring books often contain sharp perspectives that open up new horizons, words that resonate deeply, and issues that remain critically important today. Reading them can prompt you to reconsider what you took for granted, or spark entirely new ideas. At the same time, without sufficient understanding of the terminology, context, and historical background, it can be hard to grasp the content properly. Many passages are difficult to parse, requiring considerable effort. And it is often hard to find others reading the same book — leaving you to wrestle with it alone. The Five Books aims to create a reading experience where you can listen to lectures and learn, think while reading, engage in dialogue with fellow readers and the lecturer, and through layers of learning and reflection — even without fully deciphering every line — come to absorb a book in your own way. Through this service, the name "The Five Books" carries our wish: that everyone finds the five books that become indispensable to their lives.

There are books I wanted to read but couldn't keep up with on my own. Too difficult, no one around reading the same thing, not enough background knowledge. I've ended up with many unread books for those reasons. My first goal through The Five Books is to create an experience where people with the same challenges can pick up a book they wanted to read and come away thinking: "I managed to get through this part," or "that was a rich time to think." What I think about is reach. I want to make sure people who don't live near a university or reading community can still experience reading deeply alongside a researcher. Wherever you are, I want to build an environment where you can seriously engage with the books you want to read. As a platform, I care about keeping the focus on reading and thinking. I try to eliminate unnecessary complexity and keep supporting readers' reading in a simple way. For lecturers too, I believe connecting with readers outside academia is a meaningful opportunity. While using it as outreach for specialized research to general readers, the questions and perspectives from readers can become learning for the lecturer themselves. Researchers and readers thinking together — that is the other purpose of The Five Books.