Consider Phlebas

I started reading the Culture series six years ago with it's final book The Hydrogen Sonata, which I abandoned for being found annoying and unengaging. It gave me no incentive to read more Iain M Banks. Then recently I read the second book in the series, Player of Games, which was pretty good. So then I decided to read Consider Phlebas, this first book in the Culture series, even though I had heard that it's not the best one.

Consider Phlebas is an action adventure space opera in the Idiran-Culture War. It's a little confusing at first as it starts with what seems like the end of a previous tale. But little by little it moves forward and once we have learned the characters it builds to a great crescendo of excitement and violence. In the end almost all the characters are destroyed, so it doesn't seem like the lead-in to a series. And in-fact, the second book, Player of Games, stands alone and is not a continuation of Consider Phlebas.