The last book on my 2014 summer reading list, and the one I didn’t get to finish. Consider Phlebas is the first novel in Banks’ Culture series of novels. It’s a morally ambiguous space opera in which its namesake civilization — the Culture — is a post-scarcity, trans-human, machine intelligence-led empire. Daniel Landau, a CLAMP colleague at Reed College, has been urging me to read the series for quite some time, and I finally decided to try it. I’m hoping to have it finished before I got to Portland, OR for HighEdWeb 2014 later this month.