Max in the library

Max was born into too many books. For all his small life there have been a thousand of them on every side, front, and back; each wall is made of a thousand oblongs.
He climbs over, clambers over, steps over, sits on a thousand seats, he regards dust covers through his knees, he is not impressed by author except the highest one on a stack that can be toppled. A book is valuable if he can reach it and he will examine one cover after another and then, finished, will cast each volume decisively aside. Sometimes he will examine pages, turning neatly a hundred at a time, before hurling that book aside too. Then he will climb another pile, perhaps aiming for The Lord of the Rings balanced on the highest heap but actually making for a fly, caught on the windowsill and drowning loudly in the summer sunlight.
But the piles are precarious, not stacked skilfully and there is a slithering of books, limbs and fury. There is Robert Louis Stevenson now under his knees and Memoirs of Hadrian annoying his elbow and Lonesome Doves will no longer hold his toes from slipping. And down he goes, his own private landslide, brief and astonishing, that deposits him neatly on his back and next to him, scattered, a toy motorbike and the urgent need to climb again.