DISCOVERIES

JOHN SUTHERLAND, an emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London and a visiting professor at Caltech, has always struck this reader as an extremely practical man of letters -- one eye on the real world and one (rotating eye stalks may be necessary) in a book. This suggests that his “User’s Guide” to the novel will not be some frustrating academic treatise on arcane aspects of reading, nor will it be a drippy, fulsome tract about how wonderful and lifesaving books can be (of the sort written by lonely sociopaths with library cards). There are surely far too many of both in the world -- undoubtedly well meant, given the seething and overwhelming mass of novels available.

“It is possible,” Sutherland writes in his characteristic wry style, “to have too much of a good thing.... Ornithologists can, and do, observe with their own eyes up to 90 percent of the globe’s 9,000 or so surviving birds, but no one in the twenty-first century is going to scrape away at more than a tiny fraction of the fiction that is on offer.” Readers are therefore left to “huddle together for protection” in book clubs, something like cattle, and -- also like cattle, he writes, citing the hysteria over the Harry Potter books -- they sometimes stampede.

Sutherland does not presume to match books, or even genres, with readers of various stripe. Instead, he takes us step by step through the novel -- copyright, title, dust jacket and so on -- explaining a little about the history of these elements before zooming in on the experience of reading: the relationship between fiction and reality, what we have a right to expect from a novel in terms of factualness, the mysterious connections between novels and how they build on and cross-reference one another.

“How to Read a Novel” is a lighthearted, often funny book (“[I]f you prick British reviewers they do not bleed, they kick. Savagely.”). And oddly calming. There may not be time to read everything, but at least there is some hope of doing it well.

*

There Is No Me Without You

One Woman’s Odyssey

to Rescue Africa’s Children

Melissa Fay Greene

Bloomsbury: 472 pp., $25.95

“BY February 2006, according to UNICEF, more than five million children had died in the HIV / AIDS epidemic and 2.3 million children were living with HIV / AIDS. Eighty percent of those children lived and died in sub-Saharan Africa.”

What makes Melissa Fay Greene’s “There Is No Me Without You” such an effective and beautiful book is its marshaling of such mind-numbing statistics alongside stories of courage and hope that combine to create a picture -- not just of the compound in Addis Ababa where Haregewoin Teferra, Ethiopia’s controversial Mother Teresa, established a family of orphaned children, but also of a larger human family that any reader would be proud to be part of.

Greene first wrote about Teferra for Good Housekeeping magazine. When Teferra’s daughter died in 1998, she began taking in children, some HIV-positive, others HIV-negative but abandoned by dying parents; soon, she had 18 children. After Greene’s article appeared, help began arriving from all over the world. Teferra’s orphanage grew to 80 children, available for adoption. Prospective parents from many countries applied to the orphanage.

Not surprisingly, as her operations grew, so did the number of critics and bureaucratic problems. One young boy was raped in his bed by an older orphan; Teferra did not report the crime, for fear of losing her license. She was arrested -- and upon her release, she was accused of baby trafficking.

Greene is a clear and penetrating reporter. She puts Teferra’s efforts and the turmoil of Ethiopia into political, historical and cultural context. The criminals are not simply the dictators who have ruled Ethiopia for so many years but also the drug companies that value profits above human life. Greene ends with several stories of adoptions -- not all perfect fairy tales but inspiring and uplifting nonetheless.