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.)

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.

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