‘Book Doctors’ Say What You Need Is a Good Read

Reader's Advisory

Bibliotherapists recommend tomes they think can help what ails you; finding calm in ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ 

By

Sarah Sloat

Dec. 18, 2016 3:05 p.m. ET

 

Dutch novelist Mano Bouzamour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Photo: Sarah Sloat 

 

 

FRANKFURT—Depressed? Over-the-counter remedies abound, though some are hard to swallow. The 272-page “City of Thieves” by David Benioff, for example.

It is one palliative prescribed by Mano Bouzamour at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, where he sat at a desk sporting a white doctor’s coat and stethoscope. The Dutch novelist, who has no medical license, was serving as a “book doctor.” After brief consultations with people who lined up in the cold drizzle outside a pop-up clinic, he pulled out a prescription pad and scribbled titles to alleviate readers’ woes.

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Can reading make you happier? by Ceridwen Dovey

June 9, 2015

“Can Reading Make You Happier?” by Ceridwen Dovey (June 9th)ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI
Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.Read more...