To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm putting aside fiction for a while, I recently started "Chaos: Making a new science" 
by James Gleick, it's a pop science intro for Chaos Theory but a well-researched one which doesn't fall into quackery. Also thanks to our !mathematics friends for their textbook recommendations
@Aevann
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Still reading the Culture series, I'm onto Surface Detail and after that it's only The Hydrogen Sonata and I'll be done. Surface Detail is probably my third and a half favorite so far, after Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, and the bits of Excession that aren't wasting time on humans... but again, "favorite" is a strong word to use for any of the books.
Look to Windward was genuinely terrible. It's entirely boring, nothing happens, and everything that does happen is immediately subverted into making no difference.
Matter is similarly pointless, and is all the worse for being an actual doorstopper of a book.
Perhaps I've been spoiled by Gene Wolfe.
What I think my main problem is is that he's created this really interesting world with all manner of things to explore, and then he spends his novels steadfastly refusing to explore the meaningful things and instead writes crappy pulp novels that didn't need the setting to begin with and frequently actively work against it because he's trying to go way down the tech levels and tell a boring politics story or a gay politics story or a r-slurred politics story and the politics are always so small and petty and meaningless in the face of a post-scarcity reality.
Also, the more of it I read the more I'm convinced Banks is a male feminist. Every single SC agent we've been introduced to is a woman with a male drone attendant to do all the heavy lifting. The women are always described physically with emphasis on the most erotic part while men don't merit anywhere near as much of an examination.
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