When books become battlefields

June 29, 2005 | Leave a Comment

They’re oddly frozen in action. Guns out, hands up, grenades in mid-throw, the men at my elbow are forever waging a static war. The handful of dark green toy soldiers rally around a tiny plastic Canadian flag in a way I have seen few men do. They line up on the side table, a tiny formation trapped on one side by the dense foliage
printed on the cardboard wall of the Kleenex box, hemmed in on the other by a borrowed edition of E.B. White’s essays. The boldest soldier is about to charge out of the trench, scaling the dictionary that dwarfs him.