– A late-December 2025 summer-reading roundup offered an unusually industry-relevant snapshot of how book culture, screen adaptation, and publishing investment are being discussed in the same breath-by readers who also sit inside Australia’s writing, media, and higher-education institutions.
The list, dated December 25, 2025, collected reading plans from six academics and writers: David McCooey (professor of writing and literature at Deakin University), Sue Turnbull (honorary professor of communication and media studies at the University of Wollongong), Kevin Brophy (emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Melbourne), Joseph Steinberg (Forrest Foundation postdoctoral fellow in English & Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia), Kate Cantrell (senior lecturer in writing, editing and publishing at the University of Southern Queensland), and Jodi McAlister (senior lecturer in writing, literature and culture at Deakin University).
Beyond individual taste, the selections align with a commercial reality: “summer reading” is not one category but a portfolio-genre series that behave like franchises, literary titles that can travel through criticism and social platforms, and backlist classics that continue to generate screen and curriculum value. In a Southern Hemisphere context, where summer runs from December through February, these reading lists also coincide with the period when publishers, public broadcasters and ministries overseeing arts and higher education reset budgets and slate decisions for the year ahead.
Adaptation as a working lens on rights and risk-starting with “The Summer Book”
McCooey flagged The Summer Book, the Tove Jansson novel, as a summer reread and explicitly tied the choice to an upcoming film adaptation starring actor Glenn Close.
In industry terms, the remark is a reminder that even contemplative, character-driven literature can sit inside the same rights economy that powers higher-concept properties. A quiet novel’s screen pathway often depends less on spectacle than on packaging-recognizable talent, a producible setting, and a story architecture that can be translated without breaking its tone. For cultural agencies and film funding bodies, this kind of project underscores why book-to-screen pipelines are now routinely considered in parallel with direct commissioning.
McCooey also connected his reading plans to a separate screen trigger: he noted that “the latest TV adaptation of the chief inspector Maigret detective novels has recently dropped,” prompting him to read more Georges Simenon. He added a simple piece of franchise math that publishers and producers understand immediately: there are 75 books in the Maigret series. For commissioners managing multi-year drama strategies, that depth of material functions as a ready-made development slate rather than a single-title bet.
Crime fiction as a high-velocity format: rural noir and the “series” mindset
Turnbull, described as a crime fiction expert, recommended a new direction for Tim Ayliffe-identified in the roundup as a former managing editor of television and video for ABC News-through the novel Dark Desert Road.
The summary provided is clear on positioning and premise. Ayliffe’s earlier work includes the John Bailey series of political thrillers; Dark Desert Road shifts into New South Wales Riverina “and the territory of the rural noir,” replacing “his usual burnt-out journalist” with “a burnt-out cop,” Kit McCarthy. The plot engine, as outlined, is familial and escalating: McCarthy has not seen her twin sister Billie in years; Billie is described as involved in “a survivalist cult hell bent on blowing things, and people, up,” and she now needs help.
For screen and audio buyers, this is the type of logline-ready structure that routinely travels across formats-contained geography, high-stakes jeopardy, and an investigator lead who can anchor a serialized narrative-while still reading as a book-first proposition. For public broadcasters and classification authorities operating under national media and content standards, the growth of crime-led “rural noir” also raises familiar questions about depictions of violence and regional life that sit within those governing frameworks, such as the overarching obligations set out in the Broadcasting Services Act.
Literary virality and the “post-platform” author brand: Patricia Lockwood
Brophy’s picks framed Patricia Lockwood through three distinct forms that increasingly operate as one career: the contemporary novel, the memoir, and a piece of viral writing.
He referenced Lockwood’s novel No One is Talking About This, her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy (about being the child of a married Catholic priest, as he described it), and her viral poem “Rape Joke,” which he characterized as “a remarkable reshaping of thought and talk around women’s experiences of rape.”
He also cited a sentence from a London Review of Books column as an example of her voice: “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.”
Brophy said his summer aim was Lockwood’s “new post-COVID novel,” Will There Ever Be Another You. The broader industry significance is structural rather than promotional: contemporary authors are increasingly consumed as multi-format catalogs, where the novel is one node in a network that includes essays, criticism, and socially distributed writing-each feeding discovery and sustaining backlist demand. For university English departments and research councils, this convergence blurs the line between “creative work” and “impactful public scholarship,” which in turn shapes tenure files, funding metrics and the way literary output is evaluated.
Campus novels as a stable niche with institutional reach
Steinberg’s summer list was intentionally organized as a “carefully curated reading list” of novels about “the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of academia,” starting with three classics: Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and David Lodge’s Changing Places.
He then pointed to Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates-described as set at Corinth University, “a fictional reimagining of Cornell”-as well as Javier Marías’ Oxford novel All Souls and Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring. He planned to “round out the summer” with My Education by Susan Choi (which he described as “shortlisted for this year’s Booker for Flashlight“) and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.
If time remained, he said he would reread J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.
For the entertainment business, the academic novel category has a particular kind of longevity: it is persistently teachable, frequently reprinted, and often discovered through institutions. That combination can keep titles in circulation even when they are not driven by frontlist marketing cycles. It also means these books feed back into public debates on governance inside universities-around academic freedom, power imbalances and student experience-because they are routinely taught in courses that sit alongside institutional codes of conduct and national higher-education quality standards.
A book-and-film pairing that keeps circulating: “The Virgin Suicides”
Cantrell described an annual return to what she called “the same perfect pairing”: Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides and Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation.
Her synopsis in the roundup is specific about narrative and setting: the story follows the Lisbon sisters-Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese-who are withdrawn from school by their mother, kept at home, and “before eventually dying by suicide.” It is set in 1970s Michigan “in the heart of the Rust Belt,” and Cantrell framed it as a meditation on “loss and longing,” touching themes including “the failure of the American Dream.”
She also articulated why the pairing endures for her: the “hazy, dreamlike quality” that captures adolescence, and the way both novel and film blend “the magic and misery of adolescence.”
In rights terms, the example illustrates a durable afterlife pattern: a book and its adaptation can function as a joint cultural product, with each refresh of one renewing attention for the other-especially when the pairing is taught, screened, or rewatched as a seasonal ritual. For school systems and classification boards, the title also sits inside ongoing regulatory conversations about how self-harm and mental illness are portrayed to young audiences, and how parental consent and content warnings are communicated.
Australian rom-com as an investment story, not just a taste story
McAlister framed her selection inside a market claim about publishing strategy. She wrote that she had previously nominated Abra Pressler’s Love and Other Scores as a beach book and pointed to “an increased investment from major Australian publishers in local romantic comedies,” adding that the trend “has continued.”
She listed a group of Australian romantic comedies she described as 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?.
Her own beach read, she said, would be Brooke Crawford’s Better Than the Real Thing, which she summarized as a story about “a Melbourne teacher in the midst of a series of life crises” who finds “a reclusive rock star’s childhood diary,” and is offered “a lot of money” to travel in London and return it.
For local publishers and screen producers, this cluster of titles reads less like a one-off preference and more like an informal signal of where risk capital is going: contemporary romantic comedy with recognisable Australian settings and exportable hooks. The same stories are increasingly assessed not only for domestic sales but for their capacity to feed location-based production incentives, co-production treaties and streaming content quotas.
As of December 25, 2025, the roundup tied one title directly to upcoming screen activity-The Summer Book was described as having a film adaptation “on the way” starring Glenn Close-and it also noted that the latest television adaptation of the Maigret detective novels “has recently dropped.” Taken together, the six academics’ lists read as more than holiday viewing notes: they map how literary taste, institutional syllabuses and the contemporary rights marketplace are now entangled in a single summer portfolio.