I'd recommend Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang [0]. It's often billed as "speculative fiction", and I'd describe it as a series of short stories that define worlds slightly-to-extremely dissimilar to ours, and explores what that means to the people who live in them. I recall the stories being fun because there's some amount of guessing what will come next in the worldbuilding, and imagining what makes sense within the rules he's establishing, but he also drenches the stories in humanity, and many of them are quite emotional.

If you're trying to get him to read a classic specifically, maybe it would help to start with some non-fiction pieces. David Foster Wallace has an essay on what makes Dostoevsky great and worth reading [1]. And there are plenty of other essays and books out there on "why read the classics." If you think presenting your case through the lens of scientific rigor would be helpful, there are numerous studies showing that reading fiction increases empathy with others [2] (and if that's not appealing to him, you're probably in for a very long and uphill battle). For a classic recommendation, I think that similar to the article, Crime and Punishment is a good choice. It's pretty approachable language-wise, it's not crazy long, and it hits all those points of universal themes, some humor, and a deep empathy from the author to his main character.

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[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...

[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/07/04/feodors-guide-joseph...

[2] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-reading-fiction-in...