I think this is true of a lot of stories written at that time. Big Greek Epics are Dull As Ditchwater to me, though maybe chapters after the first two are completely gripping and I just never read far enough.

I've never tried reading the real Big Greek Epics. I was always satisfied with Tony Robinson's rendition of them as "Odysseus: The Greatest Hero Of Them All", which was one of my favourite books when I was a kid :-)

(Come to think of it, it's one of the few of my childhood favourites which I didn't subsequently manage to liberate from my parents' bookshelves. I wonder if my sister got it instead.)

I managed to end up with The Good Housekeeping Cook Book a.k.a. Want to cook something? It's in here somewhere*. Gutted, as it were, not that my brother was going to use it. My mother doesn't appear to have noticed it's gone. Maybe she had a backup copy...

*with the possible exceptions of sheep's eyes, and brains on toast

Robert Graves' book of Greek myths is quite entertaining and composed of largely digestible chunks, and includes explanations of such mysteries as why Athenians have “absurdly small bottoms”. To what extent it corresponds to the stories the ancient Greeks themselves old, I wouldn't like to say, however, but it's not like it'd be the first time myths got changed in the retelling.