I haven't seen Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir here. It's Sci-Fi, it might not be very sanderlanchey but it's one of my favorites. I read it in a weekend, and it usually takes me 1-2 weeks to read a single book. I gripped me from start to finish, and had a great conclusion. I recommend you give it a try!

+1 for fedora here. In my experience, laptops don’t play great with Linux, but fedora has been very stable. Everything really “just works” on my laptop and it hasn’t been like that with other distros. It’s the only one I could actually recommend at this point.

There’s zonos, and I heard of another one called GPTsovit or something like that, but I haven’t tried that one. Zonos is pretty easy to setup and run though. Another one is Kokoro, search for Kokoro TTS to find it on google.