My Month Is Booked: October 2025

Welcome to the My Month is Booked linkup! :] I’ve officially surpassed my reading goal for the year (52) — we’ll see what my total # will end up getting to after the next few months!

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The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain for Less Stress and More Resilience, by Dr. Aditi Nerurkar – Written by a Harvard stress expert + physician, Dr. Nerurkar offers 5 science-backed methods to help facilitate mindset shifts for stress management + to prevent burnout, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and other somatic symptoms that can arise from chronic stress.

I really enjoyed this book! (Twas the nonfiction pick for a recent online bookclub.) There are often books that over-promise and under-deliver — this one is not one of them. Dr. Nerurukar breaks down a number of simple, actionable steps you can take to help you to more effectively manage your stress, reframe your mindset, and find more happiness/meaning in your life. I got a lot of takeaway points from this that I will be trying to incorporate to help my patients too!

The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer – I’ve listened the author’s other book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and really enjoyed it. This was a nice quick read about gift economy — how we orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, + lessons we can learn from nature. Very soothing/healing (I listened to this one as an audiobook too), and emphasizes that our wealth comes not from hoarding resources, but from the quality of our relationships, and helping out our community.

We’ll Prescribe You A Cat, by Syou Ishida – The tagline for this book = “Cats are always the purrfect cure” and I can’t agree more. <3 The novel is set in Tokyo with 6 interrelated whimsical stories where patients who come to the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul are prescribed a cat for their woes/ailments.

I’ve been on kind of a “healing fiction” kick ever since reading Before The Coffee Gets Cold last year. This book hit home a little extra since I lost Muffin 3 months ago. :'( I still miss her every day and missed her even more/wanted to hug her after reading this.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver – I read The Bean Trees by this author back in high school and really enjoyed it + this has been on my TBR forever, so I figured I’d finally get to it! Inspired by Dickens’ David Copperfield (which I have not read), this is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia about a boy who grows up to a teenaged single mother in a trailer + how he navigates through foster care, child labor, different schools, first love, addiction, and loss.

It’s a long one (560 pages), but I couldn’t put it down. Despite all the terrible things that happen, Demon’s will to survive is truly admirable. I think this book got some criticism because it felt like it went into a lot of “hillbilly stereotypes,” but having lived there for a few years and given that this was where I started my medical training, I definitely saw a lot of what was described in here. That is obviously not to say that there wasn’t any good there (I can still easily say that I was never treated more kindly by a community as a whole than when I was living there), but given the cards the main character was dealt, it’s not hard to see why he’d see what he did.

One Italian Summer, by Rebecca Serle – “If your mother is the love of your life, what does that make your husband?” — I feel like that sentence very much summed up the book. The FMC (Katy) loses her mother to cancer right before their planned mother-daughter trip to Italy, so she decides to leave her life behind to go alone on this trip to figure out her life.

I get that she was grieving, but I really disliked how selfish she was + could not relate to the codependence. (I would expect a teenager or early-early 20’s person to act like this but noooope, she’s 30.) Also, justice for her husband. :[ I’ve read another one of Rebecca Serle’s books in the past (Expiration Dates) + thus far, it seems that while I tend to enjoy the magical realism bit of her novels, the execution kinda falls flat for me. That being said, the descriptions of Italy + the food made me want to visit. Two of my closest friends are going next year and my schedule unfortunately is looking like it isn’t going to cooperate, so I will be living vicariously through them! <3

The Fall Risk, by Abby Jimenez – A novella about two neighbors who are stranded in their apartment for over Valentine’s Day weekend. This was a super quick read + really cute. I loved the banter!

• Any books that you DNFed this month? I tried reading We Ride Upon Sticks  (by Quan Barry) and Before We Were Your (by Lisa Wingate) but couldn’t get into them.
• What are you currently reading? I’m partway into The Teller of Small Fortunes (my book club’s pick for our last meeting this year) + The Wedding People!