Three Men in a Boat
by Jerome K. Jerome (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1889); audiobook read by Sir Timothy Ackroyd (Lark, 2013)
A tongue-in-cheek travelogue of a Thames boating holiday, serving also as a framing device for comic reminiscences. At turns poetic, droll and fervent, this 19th-century novel holds up well (particularly in audiobook form) and has been echoed tonally by many later writers.