Brandon Sanderson is good if you really like reading, he’s a lib but his heart is in the right place. I’d recommend Elantris or even one of his YA series, like Skyward, if you want to get a feel for him as an author. The Stormlight Archive is shaping up to be the Wheel of Time of our age.

Terry Pratchett is also an excellent author, I could recommend many of his Discworld books, there are many self contained arcs in the series so you don’t have to read all 20+ of them

Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod: a fun sci-fi adventure with flying saucers and communist-occupied Scotland. The sequel Dark Light is pretty good, the third book was disappointing.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross: a post-singularity sci-fi/horror/mystery novel about an amnesiac war criminal who signs up for an experimental recreation of a 20th-century American town.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow: Semi-Automated Luxury Pansexual Terrestrial Anarcho-Communism.

Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. I guess techno-thrillers are like nonfiction but thrilling.

Catch-22 is good. Comedic book about people in the US Army Air Corps in WWII, written by someone who was in the army in WWII. It feels very real and enthralling despite being comedic and out there.

I originally said the last book I couldn’t put down was Neuromancer by William Gibson but not so. I read the YA novel The Life and Medieval Times of Kit Sweetly by Jamie Pacton. As an adult, and someone who dislikes coming-of-age stories, YA is not a genre I would usually read, but I’ve been trying to read outside the extremely narrow limits of my preferred genre (“medieval” fantasy, which I would rather call premodern fantasy). The gimmick of Kit Sweetly is that the title character is a girl in her senior year of high school who works as a waitress in a Medieval Times knockoff dinner theater. She wants a better job in the dinner theater but can’t get it because corporate restricts that job to AMAB people only. So her group of friends try to break the glass ceiling. Meanwhile her family is falling apart because her dad is an estranged opioid addict, her mom works two jobs, and neither she nor her brother have money for college. And, of course, she’s in love with her best friend.

Not great literature, maybe, but a much more interesting and thoughtful book than I expected. Also fun and entertaining. For the brief period in my adolescence when I actually read YA the books I was reading were not nearly this good.