Why I can't read Trollope

I guess Trollope and I were not made for one another - trying once again to read Trollope on suggestion from friend AF who enjoys AT particularly via audiobook, recommended I try Dr. Thorne, so, yes, I'm trying, but I find the lengthy introduction to the many characters and their back stories and alliances and misalliances really tiresome and the looming 1,000 pages or so before me make me think - yes, I would do this for Proust, for Mann, for Joyce, even for Knausgaard, but do I really want to give this many hours to absorb myself in this long-gone world? I don't. Maybe the fact that AF listens to Trollope rather than reads him is telling. Trollope more than any other novelist perhaps is the creature of his age, a time when a large part of the readership wanted to become absorbed in these massive, sprawling novels about a grand swath of their near-contemporary society - novels that were serialized, and for which the author was paid by the word or by the inch. Today few have the patience to read such expansive works that, to me, feel like a lot of high-level gossip (I think Trollope would agree w/ that - he strives for and attains the tone of shrewd, temperate narrator who frequently breaks through the boundaries of the story and addresses his readers directly and familiarly, commenting on his craft and his narrative intentions, as the first chapters of Dr. Thorne include several digressions on why AT's choice of a hero for the novel may not be the same choice a reader would make) - we still have the appetite for such entertainments and digressions today but we feed that appetite through media: audiobooks possibly (which generally do fill vacant spaces of time, e.g., commuting) or more likely TV dramas - and Trollope has translated very well, as has Dickens for that matter, to serial TV.