The Odyssey
Where the Iliad is about standing firm and dying gloriously, the Odyssey is about cunning, survival, and the long road home. Its structural inventions (the embedded flashback, the trial of suitors, the reunion that doubles as a test) essentially created narrative as we know it. Ulysses and his descendants haunt the entire canon, from Dante through Joyce.
The opening four books follow Telemachus, not Odysseus, and that stretch is the section readers most often name as the slow patch before the real story starts. Older, denser translations draw sharper complaints: one reader calls a version “pompous, archaic and exhausting,” and readers who hit it in school remember mostly “the words 'wine-dark sea' and that i hated it.” Even devoted readers admit the famous set pieces, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, add up to a small fraction of the whole poem, most of which is household politics back in Ithaca. One comparison against Joyce's novel shrugs that it's “no Ulysses,” and some readers say outright they prefer the Iliad, wanting “Iliad supremacy and justice for my girl Penelope.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
