Don't let me put you off it, mate.
I remember when my brother bought The Shadow of the Torturer from the Book of the New Sun series because he read the premise and saw it on a few top ten lists of Best Sci fi works and I read it before him and gave my opinion on it. Despite not liking it I HAD to finish it (Mild OCD) and the other three books in the series despite it's largely vague descriptions, odd scene transitions and Author created terminology (Dune had that shyt, and I understood damn near everything from the Sandworms, To the Navigator's Guild
).
Like you I've many books on my list to read and despite hearing less than favorable reviews for any of 'em, I'd still have to atleast try and read it so I can see why people disliked it in the first place based off of my own experience. I'll tell you this much, the dialogue is pretty annoying in my opinion. It's worse than the old timey English you'd see in Classic novels like Moby dikk where damn never everybody read the dictionary and blathered on end for the simplest of exchanges. Heck, you might like it or at the very least, hate it to a lesser degree than I do currently.