I’ve finally got around to starting Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat (I bought it a year or so ago, whereupon my wife promptly seized it and began reading. After reading it sporadically over the course of a couple of weeks, she gave up, but having given up, she just ‘put it away somewhere’, leaving me to hunt high and low, but to no avail.
Anyway, I found it yesterday and read it a while on the train to and from London. I’m only thirty pages into it, but my impression so far is that it’s an astonishingly well-written book - very engaging, in a sort of ramblingly gentlemanly fashion. It contains plenty of references to tea and jam, cheese, boiled beef, paraffin, canvas tents and methylated spirit stoves. Right up your street, I’d imagine.
Not such a great bedtime book, but To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis has a time traveller from 2058 (?) got back to 1888. Lots of kippers and kidneys for breakfast, but, of course, no bacon and eggs (that’s for the lower class). Very interesting plot and characters, funny interactions and issues surrounding time travelling, a cat… to say nothing of the dog! link
Someone outside of this board recommended that one to me. He says it’s astonishing that it’s nearly forgotten–it was supposed to be one of the major classics of the 20th century.