Happy New Year, dear readers! For those of you who are back on the tools, we hope you have had a rejuvenating break and are readying for a huge year in 2026.
The InnovationAus team has returned to pounding the keyboard and will deliver our first newsletters for 2026 this week.
There is a surprising amount of activity across the industry. The idea that Australia shuts down entirely for the month of January is a bit of a myth these days.
But if you’re lucky enough to still be at the beach, and you have finished chugging your way through our annual Summer Reading List, we bring you our repechage edition – the summer reading recommendations of the InnovationAus.com reporting team.
Our InnovationAus editor Justin Hendry concedes his choice of best industry book is a little unimaginative. Like many others (including me) he followed Treasurer Jim Chalmers into reading Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance.
He says he “devoured the book” nonetheless.
Justin says his favorite non-industry book of 2025 comes from Japan.
“I discovered a surprising sense of peace in Masashi Matsuie’s novel Summer at Mount Asama,” he says. “Set high in Nagano prefecture, Japan, it offered a searching escape from the fast-paced modern world and stirred a longing for simpler times.”
Over the summer Justin says he will be ploughing through Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 and also has an eye on Karen Hao’s Empire of AI.
Senior reporter Joseph Brookes best industry book for the year was Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington’s The Big Con as “a great eye opener on the history and influx of the consulting industry, and how often it can hobble our institutions”.
“Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoo AI Snakeoil was also a great reminder on the hard ceiling a lot of the technology has and the applications where it simply can’t work,” Joe says.
His favorite non-industry book was Josh Bornstein’s Working for the Brand: How Corporations are Destroying Free Speech as “a salient reminder of what many of us trade away for a job, the very real dangers of a mob pile on, and how ultimately the public debate is poorer for it.”
Over the summer Joe has also been reading Abundance and is getting into Sean Kelly’s new Quarterly Essay The Good Fight.
InnovationAus’ Canberra-based parliament house reporter David Allen says Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson’s book Conspiracy Nation makes for fascinating reading – especially post-Bondi – about how false narratives and radicalisation spread, and what part digital tech plays in spreading it.”
“I was expecting a bit of a “human profile” exhibit, but this is anything but. It’s a fast read, urgent and sharp as a knife. I’m looking forward to a sequel.”
And David’s favourite non-industry book?
“My earliest lucid memory (age 3) is Brisbane’s Expo 88, and We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 by Jacqui Ryan was something I read for a nostalgia trip,” he says. “Unexpectedly, I found a fascinating portrayal of the development of Australian cities as a ‘world stage’ commodity and the modernisation of Australian economies.
“The parallels between ‘Joh’s big party”’ and the 2032 Olympics are also fascinating to draw.”
Over the summer, David says he is reading Claire North’s new space opera Slow Gods.
“I am usually risk-averse to science fiction that strays too far from explicable tech, but it’s been a long year, and I am in need of dramatic escapism and radical vistas,” he said.
“Also, I am an unashamed sucker for fictional depictions of futuristic economies.”
And finally, for myself. The best industry book?
Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist who gives an eye-popping account of the AI race for domination in Empire of AI, a book focused on the rise of OpenAI and its leader Sam Altman. It raises many, many questions for countries like Australia.
Patrick McGee’s Apple in China is also – to borrow a Jobsian phrase – “insanely great.”
The most enjoyable fiction I read this year is a trilogy of 1980’s Cold War spy novels by Len Deighton that starts with Berlin Game. I love Berlin and the city is the star of this series in all its pre-unification complexity – Deighton gives us a peek behind the Iron Curtin.
Over the summer I have been chugging away at The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell, an exploration of the book and film Gone with the Wind, and the false narratives it built into popular American culture.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.