What's a good place to start reading Batman comic books?

I never really had much interest in American comics growing up, but after a little boredom-induced Wikipedia-surfing, it suddenly occurred to me that Batman was a lot cooler than I'd thought he was. But I'm seeing all these different series and arcs and characters and continuity divergences and timeskips left and right: for someone with next to no prior Batman experience, is there any sort of introductory series, or at least one that could ease me into the mythos? If someone might know of such a series and the required knowledge to read it with sufficient "fluency" (some sort of easy online way to read it might be nice, too), that be great.