Three Men and a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (1889)

I was visiting a very good friend in Billings, someone who reads more than I do, and she referenced this book in passing, and I was like 'Wait, what book?', I have never heard of either it or the author, and the subtitle (To Say Nothing of the Dog) was a hook for me.  My library did not have it, so I searched through what the Kindle library had to offer, and read it on my recent trip on the Nile.
Ostensibly this is the tale of three city clerks on a boating trip on the Thames, an account that sometimes masquerades, against its will, as a travel guide.  It hovers somewhere between a shaggy-dog story and episodes of late-Victorian farce.  The book is about the cameraderie of youth, the absurdity of existence, camping holidays, playing truant, comic songs, and the sweet memories of lost time. You could also read it as an unconscious elegy for imperial Britain.  In short, like all the finest comic writing, it's about everything and nothing.  Seinfeld could have read this and developed his modern version of the same approach.