Finally reading one of these Iain M. Banks sci-fi novels

I've been intermittently trying to get into the Culture novels for years now. The first time I picked one up was probably in college, and that was also the first of many times that I read the first ten pages of one of these books and said to myself, "This is complicated, confusing, and curiously unemotional, and I'm really not feeling it" and then tosse…