With the Culture close to completion, what comes next?

I'm looking at all of Drizzt books as the next longish series that I tackle in my NPR Sci Fi/Fantasy 100 efforts. I'm closing in on finishing the Culture series so I will have some time to give to another of the many series on that list. I'm reading Surface Detail after I finish Hotel du Lac (hopefully tonight but definitely this weekend, depending on how much Tetris 99 I play before making myself go to bed early enough that I can get up to run tomorrow (Saturday March 9)). That will leave Matter as the last novel. I'm a bit torn on the short story collection. Do I need to read the entire collection to consider my efforts with The Culture complete? I will rule on this topic for myself after I finish Surface Detail. 

The Culture is a 9 novel / 1 short story collection series. There are 26 Drizzt books. They are conveniently broken up into several trilogies so that provides some natural breaks. I have three of them as audiobook already (all acquired during some kind of sale). I will likely start with the first of these after I finish up with The Corrections. The audiobooks are a little over 10 hours, which is like a 300 page or so book. The library appears to have most of them available as ebooks so I can try the series out without any real commitment from a dollars perspective. 

It's the audiobook aspect of these books that has moved them up the list. I thought Xanth would be the next series to pursue, but I wasn't exactly blown away by the first book. It was mildly amusing, but I wasn't super eager to move onto book two. I will definitely get back to that one, but I'm going to explore some other space first. 

I will save this as a draft now, hopefully I will get back to it tomorrow having finished Hotel du Lac (and be down to 146 books to Book Shelf Zero). 

Before going though, I would like to highlight that I've made it to March without buying a single book. I've checked out loads of ebooks from the library (way more than I have actually read), but my shelves are free of books purchased in 2019. That streak will end with Matter, but it's been a nice stretch!