To all the Mansfield Park fans awaiting my review, I’m sorry to let you down. But as it turns out, I will not be reviewing Mansfield Park this summer after all.

I listened to several hours of the audiobook, but I am really struggling just to keep track of who is whom. There are so many characters. I don’t really care about anyone besides Fanny and Edward, who so far have been a remarkably small focus of page-time.

I’m sure, knowing Jane Austen, there is definitely a reason to give such tremendous detail of so many characters and relationships who do not seem important to me or the main character’s story yet. With everything else going on for me this summer, though, I just don’t have the time, patience, or attention span to get to the end and suss that out right now.

One day I will return to reading this, the longest of Austen’s novels. It is now the only completed novel of hers that I haven’t read. (Lady Susan is a novella; it doesn’t count.) It’s kind of funny, actually: I read 70% of Emma on my Kindle in high school, and 13 chapters of Pride and Prejudice in middle school, before setting them aside and coming back to read them through years later. I guess maybe this is a trend for me?

At this moment in time, with the year we’re all having, I just need a brain break. I’m moving on to the comfortingly familiar Pride and Prejudice and my personal favorite, Persuasion.