Whilst initially reluctant to read any book featuring a cow and a garden gnome on the cover, I will always be grateful that I got past my initial prejudice and read the sprawling, rollicking, chaotically perfect Going Bovine.

A very deserving winner of the 2010 Michael L. Printz award, Going Bovine is the tale of Cameron, an American teenager diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, commonly known as Mad Cow disease. Cameron's already a pretty cranky and disconnected youth, but when the hallucinogenic symptoms of his disease start to take hold, his life starts to become increasingly terrifying and entertaining. It's hard to describe such a rambling novel that takes the reader on a road trip across America, from voodoo-jazz in New Orleans, to happy-clappy religous cults addicted to positivity and smoothies, to spring-break-girls-go-wild shenanigans in Daytona.

All along the way Bray lampoons American pop culture and highlights (with affection) the various insanities afflicting her country and its teens. This is a gutsy, touching, hilarious rollercoaster ride of a book that can be enjoyed equally by adults as well as teens.

When Walter Mason spends the night in a beachside monastery, he wonders if some early rising monks might think him an apparition of Di Lac, the fat, smiling Buddha of the future. This is an apt description of my own impression of Mr. Mason after reading the personal and amusing account of his voyages in Vietnam as a festively plump foreigner.

Possessed of a fluid and receptive engagement with spirituality, Mr Mason directs his exploratory trip into the religious practices and beliefs of individuals and groups in contemporary Vietnamese society, finding charisma in all facets of Vietnamese life. I became more and more engaged with Mr Mason’s comical and touching stories, related in the sort of personal, unpolished style that heightens humour and forgives gentle moralising.

There’s been some advance fanfare for Reality Hunger, a provocative new manifesto from this University of Washington creative writing professor. In a work that is a series of hooks, Shields writes: ‘Don’t waste your time; get to the real thing. Sure, what’s “real”? Still, try to get to it.’

Often a novel begins with the note, ‘any relation between the characters and real people is entirely coincidental’, which can be blatantly untrue. In 1722, Daniel Defoe tried to pass off A Journal of the Plague Year as an actual journal and in 1595, Sir Philip Sidney had to fight for the right to ‘lie’ in literature. So we have come full circle. And yet, as per James Frey et al, we don’t like to find out we’ve been lied to for the sake of a good story.

Reality Hunger’s main concern is the blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction, the new ways we need to learn how to tell stories, and how to read and understand them. Then Shields takes apart plot. Writers beware: literature is marginalised; Shields urges us to accept that and use it to our advantage. It seems appropriate, in the year Salinger leaves us, for this new text to be obsessed with authenticity and the search for what is ‘real’. ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’ Read it first: argue later.

The long summer draws to an end, our publishing houses emerge from what feels like a long recess, and we have new and exciting offerings to behold! A particular stand-out so far this year has been Affirm Press’s terrific first couple of offerings in their short-story series, overseen by Rebecca Starford.

In a show of remarkable industriousness, she has now co-edited (in her own time no less!) a brand-spanking-new literary journal, in order to – as the editors have it – ‘reinvigorate and re-energise’ a medium that sometimes risks a certain staleness. An outstanding design concept is perhaps the first feature which lifts this journal above the average; some snappy book reviews, a cartoon from the redoubtable Oslo Davis, an extended interview with Sarah Waters, and stories from some of the most exciting exponents of Oz Lit (including Kalinda Ashton, Patrick Cullen and Chris Womersley) all indicate that this publication has every intention of becoming a fixture in our literary world.

Oh and there’s a clutch of diverse and approachable non-fiction articles too, all an ideal length for the more time-poor among us. My only gripe is a rather inflammatory piece by Gideon Haigh on the alleged decline in Australian literary reviewing – but it attests to KYD’s mission to be at the forefront of debate and exchange, for all who care about books, writing and ideas.

www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com

To Hamilton, the case is clear cut and the current growth of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a catastrophic rise in global temperature. Indeed, he argues that even if governments had the political will to act promptly and resolutely – and radically restructured their economies and societies – it may still be too late. He quotes one analysis that claims the world is irreversibly headed for 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. At that degree of warming, we would lose the Arctic summer sea ice and see the melting of the Himalayan–Tibetan glaciers and of the Greenland ice sheet.

In an earlier book, Hamilton introduced the concept of our growth fetish. It is the developed (and now the developing) world’s addiction to consumption and to economic growth at any cost that has got us into this predicament, he argues. Ironically, says Hamilton, if we took stringent measures to stabilise greenhouse gases over the next 40 years to a level where we may have a chance to survive, then the cost to world GDP in 2050 would be 2%. Reducing atmospheric carbon will not inhibit economic growth; it is the only way to ensure it is sustained.

Hamilton is pessimistic about the world’s ability to introduce measures that would give us a chance; governments are compromised by the pressure of powerful interest groups, such as the coal industry, to emasculate their climate change policies. All political parties are compromised to a greater or lesser degree and the recent experience in Australian politics is a vivid example of this. Hamilton’s book is a sobering one; it will be dismissed as scaremongering by the interests that deny global warning and alarmist by others. If the science is right, then we have little or no time to act.

Hamilton provocatively concludes his book by calling on citizens to break laws that protect those who continue to pollute the atmosphere in a way that threatens our survival.

In the wake of the science-fiction phenomenon Avatar, it is conceivable that 3D blockbusters may become the default for years to come as studios strive to emulate the giddy box-office heights of James Cameron. This is not a criticism of Avatar – it is a pulse-quickening experience – but even the most brightly lit displays can become wearying on the eye.

Duncan Jones’ first film, Moon, is a delightful antidote for those craving ideas that seem beyond the churn of Hollywood studios. Using old-fashioned models and seventies-looking interiors, Jones has created a highly realistic lunar station, from which Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) monitors and maintains a one-man mining operation. In this near-future all our energy problems have been solved by the discovery of Helium3, a clean fuel found on the dark side of the moon.

Moon gives us Sam Bell at the end of his three-year contract. He is desperately tired and lonely, bickering with his robot helper GERTY (voiced with sinister ambiguity by Kevin Spacey) and chatting at length with his indoor plants. The long-range communications satellite has been out of commission and contact with his wife and daughter has been exclusively through video recordings. With only weeks to go before he heads home to Earth, it seems all Sam has to do is wait.

But waiting alone on the moon for three years has taken its toll. Bouncing slowly across the cool dusty pock-marked terrain in a lunar truck, Sam is spooked by a vision and crashes into one of the automated Helium3 harvesters. When he awakes in the infirmary, GERTY fussing about him, Sam’s understanding of the world begins to change. GERTY seems reluctant to impart information about the crash and unusually obstructive when Sam wishes to leave the station. What ensues is a surprisingly early revelation of a key twist, from which inexorable conclusions are reached. In uncovering truths about his work, Sam begins to question who he is, why he is caught in his predicament, and what it is to live in the age of the corporation.

Underpinning these questions is the film’s minimalist aesthetic. Grey exteriors are punctured by harsh slashes of sunlight. Earth looms large, mournfully luminous but also distant and abstract. This is what it must be like to go to work alone on a mine site, awakening to straight-lined white interiors laced with moon-dust. Sam’s spacesuit doesn’t gleam - it too is dusty and scuffed. Moon abounds with such quotidian details of the working life. This is not 2001, more Silent Runnings meets Outland. It is not a film about gadgets - it is equally as fascinating to watch GERTY cut Sam’s hair as it is to see him unloading Helium3 three from a moving harvester – and the film builds its momentum around Sam’s re-conception of truth rather than any space-age technological conceit.

It is a beautiful film to watch, too, but where Moon is most extraordinary is its emotional depth. Sam Rockwell delivers the best performance of his career as an exhausted workingman prodded into action. Complemented by a stunning sonic tapestry from Clint Mansell, Moon is an intensely thoughtful and original interrogation of what our horrid, corrupt and exploitative monster of a world is up to and heading for, entirely explored through one man’s confrontation with himself.

I came late to the Skulduggery Pleasant series – starting with the third book, The Faceless Ones, and then following it with Dark Days, the fourth. I enjoyed Dark Days so much I’m now reading the first two books back to back!

For the uninitiated, Skulduggery Pleasant is a skeleton detective/sorcerer who works with his partner Valkyrie Cain (aka former ordinary Irish schoolgirl Stephanie Edgley) and a host of other characters to defeat the many powers of evil.

In Dark Days, Valkyrie must undertake a dangerous rescue mission to retrieve Skulduggery from a hellish dimension ruled by the Faceless Ones. There’s no time for her to take a breather afterwards, though. There’s the matter of the Desolation Engine – a bomb that could wipe out thousands – that has fallen into the wrong hands. I can’t say much more without spoiling a plot full of surprises, but I will say that the book ends with Valkyrie on the verge of a major identity crisis. This is smart, funny, contemporary fantasy that’s up there with the best, easily as good as the books of Cassandra Clare or Eoin Colfer.