1840 The Aerodrome a love story by Rex Warner (read 25 Mar 1984) I read this because it is on Anthony Burgess' list of the 99 novels in English since 1939 which he calls "outstanding achievements." I had not previously heard of this book, but the jacket calls it "the best English Kafka novel" and refers to its "persistent, underground reputation as a minor classic." It is an allegory about an evil man, the Vice Air Marshal, who takes over an English village, told by a man who has just, at the beginning of the book, turned 21. The moral it seeks to teach seems rather obvious to me--it is anti-totalitarian--but maybe in 1941 it was a very pertinent moral. The author was born in 1905 and attended Oxford. In 1966 he was at the University of Connecticut. Some of his novels about ancient Greece and Rome might be worth reading. {But I have never yet read any of them.] ( )