Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #59

Decided to read the Culture series. I'm currently halfway through Use of Weapons.

I immediately took a strong dislike to the culture, and every book only reinforces it. The only redeeming feature of the culture is that the drones are neat, but I'd much rather read about them than the braindead socially r-slurred narcissists that universally make up the people of the culture. Also, Ian Banks isn't a particularly good writer. He's overly fond of similes, has never heard of a metaphor, and once used the word "eyes" three times in a single paragraph with zero context changes. I also called every plot twist so far about halfway through the books, usually immediately after the character or device that it hinges on is introduced.

Consider Phlebas is just weird. Based Bora bangs a catgirl, but it's largely pointless things happening for the sake of scatological prose.

Player of Games is a lot better, but also makes me hate the people more for allegedly being so smart they can learn and play extremely complex games, but not being able to understand the wider implications of anything. Maybe he should have made it clear the protagonist was a sperg or something. Oh and the protag is called "journo" so I also automatically hate him.

Use of Weapons is.. eh so far. He's trying to do something neat with the structure of the narrative, I'll give him that. Whether it really works I have no clue, and when I tried the audio book I found it doesn't even slightly translate and is just hard to track (although Peter Kenny's voice work is top notch). At least Zakalwe rejects the culture.

I do find it amusing that even in a supposedly utopian socialist system, it's actually still hierarchical with machines on top acting as guardian monarchs to allow the humans to play in their protection.

Another win for absolute anarcho-monarchism.