To help make the transition from games to books smoother, read Parasite Eve.

Here are a few recommendations for you:

"1984" - George Orwell - the classic dystopia, it's a great book in itself and a pretty pessimistic look into the then future.

"Brave new world" - Aldous Huxley - the second classic dystopia and the superior of the two if you ask me. When you read it, if you strip away some of the sci-fi elements and look into the core of the ideas, you'll see some interesting similarities with our own world at the moment.

"We" - Yevgeny Zamiyatin - only if you've enjoyed the above two.

"Metro 2033" - Dmitri Glukhovsky - a much better story than the game honestly, with great world building and exposition, but feeling even more depressing than the game did.

"The lies of Locke Lamora" - Scott Lynch - a currently running series named "The gentelman bastards", the first book you can read on its own and love it as it is, without having to keep going with the series if you don't want. Great prose, great characters, humor and a very twisty, dark story.

"The prince of thorns" - Mark Lawrence - great fantasy with a twist and a rather edgy, dark character...who happens to be a teenager. The more you hate him, the more you'll show your age.

"Flowers of Algernon" - Daniel Keyes - sci-fi about enhancing intelligence and how that impacts a man's life. One of my all time favorite books that I've ever read.

"The Ketty Jay" series - Chris Wooding - they encompass, in order: "Retribution Falls", "The black lung captain", "The iron jackal" and "The ace of skulls". I know you don't want a series, but this is a must read if you're just looking for light and fast entertainment.

More if you need.

I'd say the history of western philosophy by Bertrand Russell.

Maybe 1984 or animal farm by George Orwell.

Also, A People's History of the United States

They're easy to get into.

Read Godel Escher Bach from Douglas Hofstadter, easy to get into with plenty of interesting observations in a series of short stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, GEB expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants

Or go for something lighter from another Douglas (Adams) and start with the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy or Dirk Gentlys holistic detective agency. Timeless classics.

I think The Martian would be a great place for you to start. It's not too long, the plot is interesting but still relatively simple, and it's entirely self contained. It does assume a degree of intelligence from the reader (it's littered with engineering terminology and the like), but it's always done in a way that even when you don't fully understand the science behind something mentioned, you understand the end result and its importance to the plot.

Adding to all that, it's not one of those "you need to keep reading to get into it" books. You'll know within a few chapters if you're going to enjoy it or not.

I'm reading Snow Crash

Some of my favorite books:
-The Book Thief
-Lord of the Rings
-The Da Vinci Code
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
-The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
-War of the Worlds

What genres do you like?

Read 'Nothing to Envy' by Barbara Demick. Excellent book about survival in North Korea during the famine in the 90s and escaping that same country. You'll probably have to keep notes on the names since they are Korean. It was sorta hard for me to keep track of who was what but other than that, amazing book!

Myself too. I'm actually working on one right now, currently about 190k words long thus far but it's not really meant for public consumption.

I do have plans to write more marketable stories in the future though.

Dune, Frank Herbert, 1966

The Parsifal Mosaic, Robert Ludlum, 1982

The Client, John Grisham, 1993

Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan, 2002