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During my elementary school years I was required to read one of many books from a list given to me by my teacher. As a young child I balked at the mere thought of reading, and when given the required task of reading I was very unhappy. After a few weeks of procrastination my parents managed to convince me to read the novel Hatchet by Gary Paulson. I slowly began to notice a change in myself, not in one area, but in many.
As a child I was very uninterested in action and adventure and was contempt with staying stationary and watching television to pass the time away. I had never attempted to immerse myself in a book, so trying to for the first time I was very skeptical. I began to read with the sole purpose of getting through the task I was assigned. Slowly but surely, page by page, I managed to get into the book, and soon I realized I was caught up in the story of a young boy by the name of Brian Robeson. Brian crash landed in the middle of a dense jungle with nothing to aid him except for a small hatchet. With no knowledge of his surroundings, Brian was forced to learn survival techniques in order to combat obstacles thrown at him by the jungle. His struggle for survival intrigued me and sparked a new found passion for reading. I began to read the rest of the novels about Brian’s adventures and soon other novels that interested me. Hatchet introduced me to the joy and entertainment achieved by reading that previously was foreign to me, and now I feel a sense of enlightenment.
Throughout the novel, Brian learns survival techniques that aid him in his escape from the forest. He learns to build shelter using only the environment around him. His ability to do so intrigued me so much so that I researched shelter building after I read the book. I was amazed that something so complex by nature could be completed using my hands and simple tools. This inspired me to learn to build shelter myself. I slowly began teaching myself to build shelter, until one day I finally succeeded. That was only the beginning; the book sparked my creativity and love to build and work with my hands. Ever