scenes you avoid -- courtesy of a comment from fajrdrako

For my fellow Vorkosigan fans (the ones who reread, at any rate):

When you reread the series, what scenes do you skip, if any? What scenes do you dread? Why?

I have three parts of the series that I have a very hard time rereading/listening to:

1) The mutineers-in-the-snow scene from The Vor Game. It's all Metzov on that one. Early Metzov is a combination of authority and madness that just gives me the cauld grue. The later Metzov trying to get along with Cavilo is much easier to deal with.

2) Mark's torture in Mirror Dance. Aside from the fact that it's torture, okay? Baron Ryoval is just too pure evil for me. We never get the backstory that tells us why he's so evil. How he's the hero of his own story and so forth. And that makes what he does so -- arbitrary. Yes, he's one very angry man about what's been done to his freezers in Labyrinth, and he's getting revenge, but we never find out why he's the kind of man who would have amassed the contents of those freezers in the first place (yes, money, but there are an infinite number of ways to amass money, and all but a few of them don't involve degrading other people). I need Ryoval's backstory if I am to have any hope of being able to read about him willingly. And even then, it's still torture, okay?

and now for something completely different:

3) The Dinner Party from Hell in A Civil Campaign. Not a darned thing to do with Evul at all. It's just a hopeless disaster, brought on by the Master Conspirator himself. And he's not the only one I cringe for. The whole first half of the book on reread is like waiting for a train wreck, you have to watch, you can't watch, you have to watch, you can't watch... Then That Scene hits. Hard. It's really difficult to read anything when you have to glance away every three or four sentences...

I still wonder what it's going to be like to listen to the audio version (not having bought it yet). [cringe]

So, anyone else willing to play?