Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.

In general, I can recommend every book by Greg Egan. Especially Incandescence, which really struck me as a great piece of hard sci-fi.

I enjoyed the book but I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief on the central conceit that you could scramble a simulation temporally and still have something like consciousness or experience. Physics has an arrow of time, and rules of how one state transitions to the next, and I can’t really grasp how you could interpose later frames of reality into earlier time slots and still have a meaningful representation of reality.

Also Greg Egan's "Learning to be me" and "Closer"

Permutation City is one of my top favourites I've ever read. It's a bit nerdy (less so than other Greg Egan books), and it also spooked me in a weird way. For a summary what it is about, it's basically this comic: https://xkcd.com/505/