The Laird Recommends: The Pickwick Papers

In 1836, a popular English illustrator named Robert Seymour agreed to let a 24-year-old writer, who published under the name "Boz", provide the text to accompany his humorous illustrations of cockney sportsman, to be published in serial. The writer's real name was Charles Dickens. Over the next two years, Dickens produced fourty installments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, subtitled, "containing the faithful record of the perambulations, perils, travels, adventures, and sporting transactions of the corresponding members." (Seymour committed suicide after finishing work for the second installment.)

I'm only 100 pages into this 850 page book, but I hereby declare it a hoot. In brief: four gentlemen, the poetic Mr. Snodgrass, the amorous Mr. Tupman, the sporting Mr. Winkle, and their leader, the inestimable Mr. Pickwick, set out from London for a journey about the English countryside. Hilarity ensues.

Here, from the introduction of Mr. Pickwick in chapter one:

A casual observer might possibly have remarked nothing extraordinary in the bald head, the circular spectacles, [...] during the reading of the above resolutions; to those who knew that the gigantic brain of Pickwick was working beneath that forehead, and that the beaming eyes of Pickwick were twinkling behind those glasses, the sight was indeed an interesting one. There sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats, as calm and unmoved as the deep waters of the one on a frosty day, or as a solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar.