Your list of audio books is very similar to how I started. I stumbled across a torrent with a bunch of Hugo winners, and those were included.

Some recommendations off the top of my head:

• Project Hail Mary (Weir).
• Snow Crash. (Stephenson).
• Cryptonomicon (Stephenson. Not sci-fi, but I highly recommend it anyway).
• The End of Eternity (Asimov. His only time travel book).

And of more recent date, the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series as released by sound booth Theater is pretty much the gold standard in Audio book production. Seems pretty shallow at first, but the sci-fi element becomes more and more prevalent with time, and it weaves a pretty interesting story. On top of being hilarious. I cannot recommend this series enough.

In addition to those, Discworld makes for some great audio books as well.

Another aspect of this that I’ve found is that engaging in benevolent smalltalk with someone here on Lemmy somehow sometimes results in them treating it as an argument.

No, I will not concede to whatever point you’re trying to make; I was making conversation, you were trying to win an argument. I don’t care if you’re convinced your particular approach to a particular problem is better than mine.

And if they then don’t realize that I’m not interested in engaging, and keep the “debate me bro” attitude, they usually end up on my blocklist, or at the very least they end up with a red tag behind their name.