I finished my 15th English book of the year a week ago, and now I'm on my 16th book. Every year I set a goal to read 16 books in English, and I'm happy that I'll reach my goal this year again.

Today, I'd like to write about the review of "Fahrenheit 451". I'm not good at reading classics, and it was challenging to read it in English. Even so, the book was very interesting, and I found lots of important messages, which author has put into his work.

If you lived in the world where you weren't allowed to read books, how would you feel? In this novel, people aren't allowed to read books, and they don't have deep thoughts or individual, independent ideas. They blindly follow whatever the big screens tell them. The protagonist, a fireman, doesn’t fight fires—he burns books. However, after meeting a neighbor girl who sees the world differently, he begins to question his own beliefs and starts to change.

After finishing reading the book, I thought about free speech. Thankfully, we have it in Japan, but it’s easy to take it for granted. What if it were controlled by governments or advanced technologies? We probably would lose abilities of thinking. We'd focus on having more personal pleasures, and we'd care less about others. In this book, the protagonist and his wife don't care each other. Their relationship seems very shallow. They even don't care social problems.

In the book, people receive all kinds of information from a screen. It means the information always comes from one way. They never question whether what they've heard is right or not. I feel like our society mirrors this in many ways. The mas-media manipulates us, and we often don't have our own opinions. Although this book was written in 1950's, the author had already predicted what would happen in the future. Books are very important to keep our thoughts, history, culture, information and knowledge and to pass these to the future generations.

This book truly made me think deeply about a lot of things.

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