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Academic rigour, journalistic flair

pexels anntarazevich. What’s on your summer reading list? We asked 6 dedicated readers Published: December 24, 2025 8.43pm GMT Jo Case, The Conversation, David McCooey, Jodi McAlister, Joseph Steinberg, Kate Cantrell, Kevin John Brophy, Sue Turnbull

Author

Jo Case
Senior Deputy Books + Ideas Editor

Interviewed

David McCooey
Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
Jodi McAlister
Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University
Joseph Steinberg
Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, English & Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia
Kate Cantrell
Senior Lecturer, Writing, Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland
Kevin John Brophy
Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Sue Turnbull
Honorary Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.yt5fs44pf

https://theconversation.com/whats-on-your-summer-reading-list-we-asked-6-dedicated-readers-269287 https://theconversation.com/whats-on-your-summer-reading-list-we-asked-6-dedicated-readers-269287 Link copied Share article

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When I think about summer reading, I think about relaxing with an easy page-turner … but I also think about finally having the headspace for the more complex, challenging books that have haunted my bedside table during the busy year.

Summer reading is often characterised as paperback romance or detective fiction. And it is that. But it’s also anything your tired, finally well-rested brain wants to apply itself to in the sunnier months: on a beach, by a pool or splayed on a couch under an air conditioner.

We asked six avid readers what they plan to read this summer – and their answers reflected all of the above and more. I’ve already stolen a few ideas to add to my own hopeful pile. (So far, it includes Susie Boyt’s much-raved-about novel Loved and Missed, a biography of her father Lucian Freud, Dominic Amerena’s literary satire, I Want Everything … and Anna Karenina.)

The Summer Book … and Belgian crime

What better time to revisit The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson? It helps that there is a film adaptation on the way (starring Glenn Close), though I wonder how this bittersweet, funny and pitch perfect story of a girl, her grandmother and her father spending a summer on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland can be rendered in filmic form.

Talking of adaptation, the latest TV adaptation of the chief inspector Maigret detective novels has recently dropped – and that encourages me to read more of the short novels by the Belgian writer, Georges Simenon. I read half a dozen Maigret novels last summer, but that’s fine – there are 75 books in the series. Good times.

David McCooey is professor of writing and literature, Deakin University.

Page-turning rural noir

As a former managing editor of television and video for ABC News, Tim Ayliffe has always had a keen eye for the hot button issues of the day. That’s reflected in his John Bailey series of tense political thrillers. But Dark Desert Road promises to be something different.

Here, Ayliffe heads west into the New South Wales Riverina and the territory of the rural noir. His usual burnt-out journalist in the eye of the storm is replaced by a burnt-out cop. Kit McCarthy hasn’t seen her twin sister Billie in years. This is quite understandable as Billie seems to have got herself involved in a survivalist cult hell bent on blowing things, and people, up. So now she needs help.

That’s the premise – and it promises to be just the right kind of energetic page-turner for a lazy holiday read.

Sue Turnbull is honorary professor of communication and media studies, University of Wollongong – and a crime fiction expert.

Patricia Lockwood

Last summer I read Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, a novel that’s up-to-the-minute smart about contemporary life on social media until halfway through when it takes you by the throat and leaves you gasping.

I went quickly to her 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, where she recounts life as the child of a married Catholic priest. More lately, I read her viral poem, Rape Joke, a remarkable reshaping of thought and talk around women’s experiences of rape. You have to love a writer who can come up with (in a London Review of Books column):

Perhaps for the bug reason, she could only ever picture Kafka lying on his back. Perhaps because of his surviving photos, she had the idea that he medically could not blink.

This summer, I hope to read her new post-COVID novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, hoping for more writing that identifies and breaks our taboos – like the best jokes do.

Kevin Brophy is emeritus professor of creative writing at University of Melbourne.

Novels about academia

To some, summertime means spontaneity. To me, an adorer of a syllabus if there ever was one, it means a carefully curated reading list. This year, the plan is to spend as much time as possible reading novels about the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of academia.

I’ll start by revisiting three classics – Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s inimitable Pnin, David Lodge’s Changing Places – before I move on to books I haven’t read before.

At the top of my list is Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates, a portrait of infidelity and pomposity at Corinth University (a fictional reimagining of Cornell). Next are two darkly comic novels from the nineties: Javier Marías’ Oxford novel All Souls and Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring. Then, I intend to round out the summer with My Education by Susan Choi (shortlisted for this year’s Booker for Flashlight) and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

If there’s any summer left at the end of all this, I’ll devote it to rereading some old favourites: JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

Joseph Steinberg is Forrest Foundation postdoctoral fellow, English & Literary Studies, The University of Western Australia.

Book & film: The Virgin Suicides

Every summer, I return to the same perfect pairing: Jeffrey Eugenides’s elegiac novel The Virgin Suicides and Sofia Coppola’s fever-dream adaptation. The story – a meditation on loss and longing – follows the tragic fates of the Lisbon sisters (Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese) who are withdrawn from school by their stifling mother and imprisoned at home – before eventually dying by suicide.

Set in 1970s Michigan, in the heart of the Rust Belt, the story brushes against some big themes: the horror of the mundane, the decay of memory, the failure of the American Dream. But the novel’s thematic complexity is not as powerful as its aesthetic imagination. I revisit the girls’ world obsessively because its hazy, dreamlike quality captures, with unnerving accuracy, how it felt to be a teenage girl. Simply put, the summer was long and languorous, and the house was always too small.

Eugenides’s novel, like Coppola’s film, skilfully blends the magic and misery of adolescence: the sacred rituals and secret pacts, the constant scrutiny and creeping sense of entrapment. Like adolescence, summer too is defined by its inevitable ending.

Kate Cantrell is a senior lecturer in writing, editing, and publishing at the University of Southern Queensland.

Australian romantic comedies

A couple of years ago, I nominated Abra Pressler’s Love and Other Scores as my beach book and noted that it was part of an increased investment from major Australian publishers in local romantic comedies. As someone who both writes and studies romance fiction, I’m delighted that this trend has continued.

There has been a spate of excellent Australian rom-coms released this year: Steph Vizard’s A Smart Girl’s Guide to Second Chances, Patrick Lenton’s In Spite of You, Emma Mugglestone’s In the Long Run, Darcy Green’s After the Siren, Karina May’s That Island Feeling, and Holly Brunnbauer’s What did I Miss?, just to name a few.

My beach read this summer is also a local rom-com: Brooke Crawford’s Better Than the Real Thing. This is a story about a Melbourne teacher in the midst of a series of life crises who unexpectedly finds a reclusive rock star’s childhood diary. When he offers to pay her a lot of money to travel in London and return it to him – how can she refuse?

Jodi McAlister is a senior lecturer in writing, literature and culture, Deakin University.