An epic worth reading for its historical value, but somewhat struggling to hold up today. There's a great story in here, but the pacing is awful, with huge sections that are just people droning on with pleasantries and eating meat together. The structure is good though, and I bet you could cut those 24 books down to 12 without losing much!

As with the Iliad, I chose to read Alexander Pope's version, a rich and grandiose translation into heroic couplets, and I'm glad I did; the rhyme and meter feel like the English equivalent of Homer's original, and the now-archaic language lends an ancient reverence to the poem that I think Greeks in the classical period would have got from Homer.

I continued my "reading as a serial" experiment, setting up an RSS feed to deliver me one book per week. This seems to be a really good way to motivate myself to read, since a huge tome like this can be quite daunting.