24. The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks.

 This is the second book Iain M. Banks wrote about the Culture , and it's  a very utopian sci fi society. Nothing is forbidden, and everything is provided, with the Culture living on giant ships or fake planets built by machines, that are incidentally way more brilliant than humans can possibly achieve. Gurgeh is a master game player, who gets convinced to travel to play an ultimate new game on a distant planet.

I really enjoyed this book. I've read the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, and found it most excellent but rather squeamish to read (more on that later)  and this has all of the excellent with none of - well, a huge amount less than - the squeam. The story pulls you in, and I get the feeling that there's a lot more hidden link-ups and tricks in the text than I picked out when I read it. Very entertaining to read, and hard to put down.