Can a book solve your problems? Yes, if one of your problems is that you wish to read a book. Or if another one of your problems is that you would like to learn about a certain subject. If your problem can be expressed as “I would like to feel X type of feeling,” a book perhaps can help, but here complications start to dawn. And if the problem is “I would like to be X type of person,” the situation grows thornier still. Although the experience of reading involves fulfilling needs you didn’t know you had, literature—like most things that are free—reacts poorly to being instrumentalized.

A field of advice columns that lob texts at people’s troubles has flowered recently, from the Times’ “Match Book” to Lit Hub’s “Dear Book Therapist” to the Paris Review Daily’s “Poetry Rx.” The series run the gamut from straightforward recommendation engines (ask for a thriller, receive a thriller) to columns that see books not as frigates or loaded guns but as medicine, selected from the canon’s well-lit pharmacy by a critic in a smock. In “Match Book,” Nicole Lamy dispenses recommendations to letter writers requesting “literary page-turners” or “authors I can binge-read” or “poems for young readers.” “Dear Book Therapist,” a new venture by the licensed therapist and author Rosalie Knecht, pairs emotional conundrums (“I have forgotten . . . why I shouldn’t listen to the nasty, self-loathing voice inside myself”) with books that might offer inspiration or solace. “Poetry Rx” likewise puts a fanciful, impressionistic spin on a service-y premise: “Readers write in with a specific emotion,” the introduction explains, “and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match.”

The books we choose to spend time with, the voices we want in our heads, are windows into who we are and who we long to be—which also happens to be the domain of the advice-giver. Agony aunts give people the tools to “level up,” to breathe a more rarefied and aspirational air, a project that can seem pleasantly at odds with the mundanity of the action items, which often entail such steps as hiding your vibrator. Carolyn Hax and Dear Prudence keep their tips practical, unless, as occasionally happens, a letter requires them to wade in with the miraculous Thor hammer of life-changing insight. Dear Sugar and Ask Polly counsel at a cosmic frequency: their replies are rambling, lyrical, designed to melt one’s brain. (E.g., “YOU ARE CURRENTLY PRAYING AT THE ALTAR OF THE MOST TEDIOUS RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSE.”) Book-centered advice might similarly aim toward the sublime—once social media redefined “personality” as an aggregation of preferences and aversions, identifying just the product for someone could morph into an almost spiritual activity, like ministry.

With “Match Book,” Lamy keeps to the pragmatic side of the advice spectrum. Her task, which she fulfills via summarizing, is to demonstrate that the chosen volumes meet the criteria set forward by the asker. That’s it! Unless you share the letter writer’s quest, this doesn’t make for electric reading; her capsule descriptions by necessity lend themselves to “book review-ese,” that peculiar form of writing about books wherein you try to spark extravagant adjectives against each other to generate a sense of what the book is like, but the modifiers end up feeling random and fungible to anyone who hasn’t experienced the prose for herself. (Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian” is “propulsive, lacerating”; Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body and Other Parties” is “mesmerizing and eccentric.”) But lofty criticism is not Lamy’s intent; what “Match Book” excels at is whetting one’s appetite to read books—to go elsewhere.

While Lamy confronts literary problems with literary solutions, “Dear Book Therapist” assumes that human problems might have book-bound antidotes. To the letter writer plagued by self-loathing voices, Knecht first offers a paragraph of corrective empathy and kindness. “As long as you’re not sure where it’s coming from,” she says, of the cruel monologue, “it will continue to sound like a profound and universal truth instead of some dumb nonsense that you have outgrown.” Then she unveils the text that illustrates her theme: “One! Hundred! Demons!,” by the comics artist Lynda Barry, who “has written and drawn a lot about feeling fundamentally incorrect.” Knecht’s inaugural column scans as essayistic and wry, a source of counsel that just so happens to import its examples from the world of literature. In fact, its featured titles do not always line up with what the petitioner appears to have asked for. When a “23-year-old software engineer looking to begin writing seriously” requests “a book on the writer’s life and how they began,” Knecht playfully misunderstands him. “Would you like to be the kind of writer who makes a living teaching at a college, has sabbatical time in which to write huge sprawling prestige works, and spends a lot of time introspecting while also strenuously avoiding real insight into your own behavior?” she inquires impishly, flagging Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys.”

Picking up “One! Hundred! Demons!” because you believe it will exorcise your own devilish self-talk seems like a waste of “One! Hundred! Demons!,” but, luckily, Knecht doesn’t really aim to transform letter writers’ lives via the orphic power of literature. Ask not what Lynda Barry can do for you, she seems to caution. Knecht’s most usable insight is the reminder that a lot of painful experiences are universal, or at least shared widely enough that people have written books about them. At the bottom of the page, a disclaimer reads: “This column does not constitute medical advice.”

The Paris Review Daily’s Poetry Rx is floatier still. Instead of instrumentalizing the work, it instrumentalizes the reader questions, using them as pretexts to meditate on beloved poems. This seems wise: in line with what visitors to the Web site actually want to see, and also in line with W. H. Auden’s ruling that “poetry makes nothing happen.” When a letter writer asks for verse that he can get sober in, the poet Kaveh Akbar unspools a length of textual analysis and personal reflection that is as abstractly lovely as it is unlikely to convince anyone to put down a bottle at 2 A.M.: “For me, so much of recovery has been centered on salvaging, pouring verse (my own and others’) into the cavities of my own knowing. ‘Burning Haibun’ examines the virtues and limitations of this process while also deftly leaning into the doubleness of erasure experienced by so many queer addicts—erasure by addiction, yes, but also erasure inscribed by domestic, familial, or cultural violences.” (The grandmother of this discursive genre appears to be Jo Livingstone’s compassionate and beautifully wrought “Dr. Jo’s Rx,” in which she prescribes “canonical works of art” to readers ranging from would-be Ph.D. students to someone “so lonely I would literally pay someone to assassinate me.”)

These columns can seem like tests for the advice-giver, or even excuses to perform comprehensive literary knowledge: Hark! Here, from my sleeve, is the equivalent poem for how you feel. It turns out that asking books to address your emotional hangups is not unlike watching the proverbial pot of water on the stove—only after you stop trying to extract measurable benefits from “Jane Eyre” does Jane appear before you, her face a clearer and deeper mirror for your own. It’s impossible to bottle a library’s therapeutic powers, but it’s understandable why one would try. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, a piece of art tells the speaker, “You must change your life.” Then the poem ends. The statue never elucidates how the speaker should change, or even where to begin. Still, a downcast letter writer might draw inspiration from this broken stone, how it is able, Rilke insists, “from all the borders of itself,” to “burst like a star.”

This article has been updated to include Jo Livingstone’s column “Dr. Jo's Rx.”