Mrs. Tygr and I enjoyed reading the back-and-forth correspondence of the Griffin and Sabine books. They are beautiful to look at and a very interesting story as well.
We have the full, single volume Globe Annotated Shakespeare which we bought intending to read together, though we’ve not done that yet. I actually find that Shakespeare seems easier to “get” when read aloud.
Watership Down is a great idea. Maybe we’ll try that.
How about The Eye of Argon. Reportedly, no one can read it all the way through out loud without cracking up:
My ex-wife read the whole of Brennu-Njalls Saga to me. The book was in Old Norse, but she read it out in English–without using a dictionary. I still marvel at that.
If you want more good quality contemporary crime fiction as mentioned in the OP, you might like Carl Hiaasen. (I’ve recently had some reading-out-loud-to-the-girlfriend success of my own with his book “Native Tongue”, so give him a try!)
If you liked Imajica, I bet you’d like Gene Wolfe. Start with Litany of the Long Sun, which combines the first two books of the Long Sun series. Really great stuff, in a somewhat similar vein to Barker’s Imajica.
Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
Why read aloud? Because** Drachillix** has a sexy voice!
I second Carl Hiaasen for fun stuff-- we liked Sick Puppy best.
Yesterday, we read much of Daniel Pinkwater’s Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories, it’s great if you like dogs. Another collection of amusing essays is David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day. I used to love Farley Mowat. I’m gonna assume you’ve read Lolita if you like the stuff where the authors just roll in the rythms of their words. Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips is a good short story collection. P.G. Wodehouse’ Bertie and Jeeves stuff is fun too.
I forgot to mention Griffin and Sabine, we really loved that series, as the wife is an artist as well. We do have Shakespeare, but the wife was a bit theatre geek in college and worked on so many of the plays that it is kind of moot to re-read them. We might try it anyway.
Thanks again for all the suggestions!