Harry Potter would be a lot of fun, and the books are infinitely better than the movies… And if you’re looking for books to lose yourself in, JK Rowling is fantastic at creating such a vivid world and intense, intricate story.—While you’re at it, you could listen to her newer books too! I read the Casual Vacancy and quite enjoyed it.
Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog was great. It should read aloud well—clear story line, with many tiny details piecing together by the end. For whatever reason I thought the first few pages were a little difficult to get into, but details matter even then, and the story’s plot begins to accelerate and accelerate through the end (so get ready!).
Re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (for a project)—her prose is absolutely gorgeous. This book in particular was her first novel, and (as has been described to me) her most “accessible,” which is a good thing when you’re listening to the words (you wouldn’t want to keep going back and re-listening to parts).
I’ve yet to finish the book (I will soon, I tried when I was quite young and realized some of the stuff was going over my head)—Carl Sagan’s Contact should be a good one. I grew up on the movie (which he also wrote, adapting the novel—it is a great movie too), and what I remember of the novel was quite immersible.
LIfe of Pi Yann Martel—the first part is fascinating, the second part fascinating and fantastical, the third part a stunning close
This Boy’s Life Tobias Wolff—memoir that is fiction, a little more serious
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien—fiction that is memoir, if you want something even more serious
This one might be a little out there, but if you can find it on audiobook (and in translation to English), Silence by Heldris of Cornwall would be fun: it’s a medieval story, but it’s so entertaining. There’s a girl who was raised as a boy, allegorical Nature fighting Nurture, and Merlin makes an appearance, etc. (I may have recently been in a medieval lit seminar…!)
If you want something absurdly entertaining and easy to listen to, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—again, book so much better than the movie. And the movie just gets certain things wrong. It’s a peculiar humor, but hilariously so.
... And that’s all I can think of right now