Did it bore you in college? Try it again: it's sex, dismemberment, and the beauty contests of goddesses — narrated by Ian McKellen
Like Shakespeare and Scripture, the Greeks are worth reading as, if nothing else, a sort of cultural paternity test. One taste of their epics, and you'll discover yourself — not to mention all of Western civilization — genetically coded with Greek attitudes and habits.

Well, not exactly. The Odyssey is, of course, the text that's supposed to dryly reveal the origins of all our modern ideas about war, selfhood, family and duty. But if Penguin's latest audiobook edition is any indication, it turns out the actual pleasure of the classics is in finding out those ancients beloved by schoolmarms and culture-war conservatives might today be called obsessives, sadists, autistics. With motivations so inscrutable, it's no spoiler to reveal here that important developments in Homer generally involve sex, dismemberment, soliloquy or all three. As gravely recited by Ian McKellen — remember, these epics were meant to be heard — The Odyssey becomes a hypnotically "primitive" experience, revealing an alien order of things about as familiar to Westerners as those of the I Ching or Hindu Vedas. Sir Ian's Queen's English only adds to the uncanniness: Sure, Odysseus' lonely struggles at sea and Penelope's forbearance in Ithaca are touching, and indeed suggestive of something like the birth of human interiority and romantic love. But some 14 of this recording's unabridged 15 hours are spent on quandaries rather less timeless — goddesses in beauty contests, iron-age navigation techniques, typologies of monsters of land and sea. So forget universal ideas of honor, civility, democracy: Homer reveals gory, lusty ephemera as the true fixations of classical times, and the secret is, they're remarkably compelling — even if, well, Greek to me.