First off, welcome to the world of endless knowledge
Some good "entryway" books to concepts explained in human-readable ways are books like things like "
How to teach quantum physics to your dog" (apparently, Orzel's other book too, but I've not read it so can't recommend personally), even though it's focused quite a lot on the quantum obviously, and Hawking's classics - "The Theory of Everything" and "The Universe in a Nutshell" are good starting points, and "A Brief History of Time" is the classic but more complex as you put it so I suggest starting with the other two before tackling it.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is also great and very easily digestible but tackles more, not solely physics.
Feynman's lecture-collection "The Character of Physical law" (in pdf here) is more scientific I suppose, but it's not a textbook, more of an explanation of some things, similar to how Cox does his lectures nowadays.
You can obviously build upon that with more academic or singular-theory-focused things later on, but those are off the top of my head. I think most of those are available as audiobooks too if that's your thing, but I found it too distracting as it doesn't "let" me visualise/conceptualise as well as it does when I read things, but that's a me-problem.
@Gwladys St. Glory 's suggestions are also good, even though
I dislike Neil deGrasse Tyson personally, he's good enough and a great expert in astrophysics and nothing else.
Also brush up on any and all maths if you intend to understand things going forward
If all else fails, just go for the classic "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and you'll do well enough
