>>>BTW, I'm reading "Excession" for the third time now. Still can't memorize who's who among ship minds...
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>Good Old Sleeper Service...
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>Have you done "Surface Detail"? The heroine in the Abominator is one of my favorite Culture sequences. Almost as great as finding "Remember Phlebas" at an airport store and buying it because the cover had an orbital.. and then discovering the Culture.

I wasn't precise. This is my third reading of whole Culture, this time including the emless Banks, as far as I had patience. While I found "Wasp factory" and "Walking on glass" just bizarre and a good exercise to try out a few things he'd have in Culture, the rest is a mixed bag. "Bridge" is very interesting, I've read it twice. "Canal dreams" is also an interesting exercise in creating a nice bubble in an unlikely location, with unlikely characters becoming a band of fellows, only to shatter the whole thing in the second half and turn it into something completely different. And if Čehov's (aka Chekhov's) gun must hang somewhere in act one, here he had whole arsenal, literally everything ever mentioned in the first half becomes a weapon later :).
I liked "Complicity" and "Espedair street" too, but when it came to "The crow road" - I've just had enough of Scotland and family relations, so while I've read it, I already forgot what it was. As for "Whit", gave up after a chapter or two.