I have discovered some more books for my running list of children's lit books about literacy. It may be an overly ambitious or redundant project, since of course children's literature is concerned with conceptions of reading. But I do at least see different emphasis in some of the books. Is literacy primarily a social concern, or an individual concern--of primary use to individuals? That does seem to be something that different authors represent differently. I haven't managed to find a thematic list of children's fiction that includes literacy as I'm defining it, so my main question at this point is how to find books that relate to my topic?
But anyway, here are some:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge
Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) by Ursula Le Guin
Exchange by Paul Magrs
The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh
The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff (An overt statement about censorship--dealing with it directly by portraying a battle with parents who want to ban Huck Finn. Yawn. But very representative of why this is an issue in children's lit in the first place.)
Some of the themes will no doubt make good comparisons with 1984 and Brave New World.
