Three Men in a Boat

Three friends, one perpetually anxious dog named Montmorency, and a rowing trip up the Thames that was supposed to be relaxing. Every stop turns into a small disaster — tangled tents, disastrous cooking, wildly unreliable weather forecasts — and every disaster is recounted with a straight face that makes it funnier than any joke could.

Jerome K. Jerome's comic masterpiece hasn't aged a day: it's the original travel-gone-wrong story, the ancestor of every modern "vacation disaster" comedy, and still one of the funniest books ever written about the simple horror of spending a week outdoors with your friends.