Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Have you read The Odyssey? I've been meaning to read Ulysses for years, but keep telling myself I'll read The Odyssey first.
I read quite a lot of it, reading along with Ian McKellen's performance of Robert Fagles translation. (This was off the back of the success of reading Paradise Lost along with Anton Lesser's performance.)
It's hard to say whether due to Fagles's translation, McKellen's performance or the Odyssey itself - but I didn't much care for it. The best bits were those which most people are probably familiar with from adaptations - the Cyclops, the Sirens, etc.
A lot of the interest in it comes from how alien it is to modern sensibilities - there's none of the psychological interiority we expect, and it's full of these (to our mind) primitive religious rituals.
I suspect that McKellen put me off it a bit - he's a great actor but his narration really got on my tits after a while. Anton Lesser reading Paradise Lost was A1 though. Of course, Milton is an order of magnitude more of a poet than Fagles...