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911roofer
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talk about books or smth idk
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Still going through the Culture series.
I can see why Use of Weapons is the most popular one, it's not bad. Still not amazing though. State of the Art is meh, Inversions is actively bad. I'm about a quarter of the way through Look to Windward and it's going ok.
My initial impression - that people like the Culture novels more for the idea of the setting than for the writing - has firmed up the more of it I read. Also, anyone who likes the idea of The Culture as a setting is an absolute brainlet.
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Use of Weapons and the Player of Games are the only ones I can honestly say I enjoyed.
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Player of Games was good, but unfortunately GurGay was an absolute giga-neurodivergent whose inability to extrapolate the rules of the game to the society despite being told they're recursive means he's nowhere near as good a player as we're supposed to believe he is.
Over the course of several books, it's clear that Special Circumstances is exclusively made up of drones and minds. All the humans who believe themselves to be part of it are just catspaws of the machines, no more a true part of it than the agents they themselves quarterback.
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Excession is the weirdest of them. It cemented in my mind that Ian Banks was actually a sociopath and probably a serial killer, or sublimated that into his books (The Wasp Factory was another one). Still, a genius, but oftentimes somewhat unsettling.
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I completely forgot Excession, even thought I read it right before Inversions. That's how bad Inversions was.
It probably also helps that Excession is half spy drama between super-intelligences that are impossible to actually portray as a human author because we fundamentally cannot understand the way they would think, and half a story about a foid being
so it's bery forgeddable 
Peter Kenny doing the voice for the Killing Time was great though.
It's also funny how the culture is apparently incredibly free spirited, and yet his writing is incredibly male gaze-y and there's basically zero strag love even when it's supposed to be common. Then again, Ian Banks literally looks like
so I'm not entirely surprised.
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