Do you like time travel stories at all? I recently read 11/22/63 by Stephen King and absolutely loved it. Outside of that, I highly recommend The Stand, although it is a big undertaking. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books were great to me, although I stopped after Memnoch The Devil and didn’t keep up after that. Oh! And the Jurassic Park novel is great too, and is very interesting even if you’ve watched the movie. Lastly, I really enjoyed the Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter series (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal).
Open office layouts are absolutely terrible. Why more places haven’t figured that out, I’ll never know.