Two books have been sitting on my shelves for quite some time, promising may be more than they could deliver, but whose titles and ethos gave me a little fillip of optimism: Reading to Heal by Jacqueline Stanley (ISBN: 97818622043609) and The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin (ISBN: 9780857864215). Both books promote the power of reading to feel better and change your life, the former suggesting that any kind of focussed reading is good for you; the latter specifically suggesting all manner of novels that might help to deal with specific ailments.

Bibliotherapy is basically book medicine and I have been self medicating –and regularly overdosing — all my life. Books obviously can and do change how you feel as long as you can open yourself to them; its not a therapy that works for everyone and you have to know how to engage with what you read for it to work. Book are doorways, connectors from one state to another, and there is magic to them; I’m not sure a prescription of ‘healthy reading’ would work for many people. As a bookseller I’ve always tried to point people in the right direct and then discreetly back away to let them make their own choices. ‘Must Reads’ create a sense of obligation and potential disappointments whereas ‘Maybe Reads’ open up an index of possibilities.

I recently read Robinson Crusoe, a book which was often foisted on my as a child and which I found unbearably dull, completely lacking in any imagination or excitement, a dull materialist fable and I could never get beyond Crusoe’s early mercantile dealings in the slave trade before he got anywhere near the island. A few weeks ago I started to read it again, on a whim in the middle of a sleepless night, and once started I couldn’t put it down as if the book had something important to share with me.

And it did. Robinson’s shipwreck may have been an Act of God, but if so if was the beneficent intervention of a higher power. Crusoe goes to see despite a very strong warning from his father of its dangers and the result of this choice leads him build a profitable slave plantation in South America. It is on a voyage to capture new slaves that his ship is destroyed and he becomes a castaway on a desert island the only survivor.

From the first fate works always in Crusoe’s favour, from the was with which he is able to salvage quite a lot of useful stores and implements from the wreck, to the fact that his island has fresh water, a steady population of animals that can be tamed and bred and soil that can be cultivated, places to shelter and its geographical position being sufficiently remote that visits from hostile tribes, native on the continent, are rare.

The narrative could actually be a parable for God’s grace, and early on in novel Crusoe realises that he has been ‘saved’ and adopts an attitude of regular prayer and acts of gratitude. His natural aptitude for working with his hands and for farming and basic manufacture are a tribute to the seventeenth century Protestant work ethic while also suggesting that his natural potential was simply waiting to unfold.

However, its is not until Crusoe self-consciously makes the decision to reconnect to the human race (by rescuing Friday from a cannibal tribe who were planning to sacrifice him) does Crusoe’s salvation become manifest, and a series of complex deus ex machina he is able to overcome a mutiny and commandeer a ship back to England.

On one level, Robinson Crusoe is retelling of the Book of Job; Crusoe is tested and found worthy. His early travails on the island after many decades work in his favour and facilitate his escape. Its a wonderfully optimistic novel and the positive energies of the last third are such that Defoe has to tell us that there will be a sequel because Crusoe’s adventures, despite his advanced age, are far from over.

This is not a book I would have picked up consciously or read on the recommendation of others and yet, it seems to me, this was exactly the book I needed to read to help progress to the next stage in my life. Maybe we all know at a deep level the patterns of our next unfolding and we just have to be open to the possibility of the best next thing, however strange and unlikely it may seem.