I kind of read the Odyssey in college.
In an effort to speed run community college to catch up after leaving the Art Institute my parents had me take a summer classes. Classes were from 8am - 11pm every day for 5 weeks leaving me time to work in the afternoons. I had managed to get through a government and math class doing this without issue the first summer. A bunch of my classmates from high school were there as well to take cheaper basic courses while on break from UT or A&M.
But then one summer I took an English class. I figured I'd zoom through it just like the others because at the end of the day 80% of your grade depended on your final essay and that was my main play in college. I was not an English major and only needed a few of these basic English classes. This summer English class was World Literature 1...
It was being taught by a professor who normally did full semester length classes and this was her first time attempting to cram everything into a summer course. We knew there would be a lot of reading because it was an English class but being a summer course we expected to have equal parts of classwork and homework assigned. That's how the others went, you had 3-4 hours of class and were given 3-4 hours worth of homework due the next day. Most if not all of us were random other majors - we were all just there for the required credits.
World Lit 1 was set to cover ancient literature up to the medieval era. It was five weeks long. We read - in their entirety - the following epic poems and stories: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Sappho's Fragments, Beowulf, and ending with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
We did great the first few days with Gilgamesh because it's short and simple. She gave us a quiz at the start of class each day to see if we actually read the assigned pages etc. (Hand written, short paragraph answers.) Easy, Gilgamesh is fun.
Then came the Iliad. Straight off the bat, first few days of reading and we are all struggling with not only the volume of the assigned reading but the ability to answer the quiz questions the next day. These were like abstract "what if" questions, not something you could skim through the material for. You needed a firm grasp on the story and the characters. By the third day of everyone showing up unable to sort out who was fighting who and why the professor pumped the brakes on the quizzes. She would sit and explain what happened in the assigned pages in the first hour of class and answer everyones questions about what was going on. There were a lot of questions.
Yall, our grades were hot trash. Our quiz grades averaged in the 40's. About halfway through the Iliad our whole class met up afterwards to talk about the difficulty. Nearly all of us had jobs to go to after class and couldn't keep up. Then a group of girls who were friends from high school came back one Monday and suddenly could answer questions and who was who - dots had been connected. They explained that they went to the theater over the weekend and watched Troy. (This was in the summer of 2004.) The rest of us all made plans to go see it that week and I think it helped enough to get us through the end of the Aeneid.
After that we went on to the Odyssey. Same problem but now with characters we sort of remembered. Every morning we got the explanation of what was happening, then went home to read 100+ pages. Come back the next day and repeat. On Fridays we would be given a quiz and then a brief intro to the next week's texts so we could get a jump on it.
I can't tell you how much all three of these books just blended together. We were all struggling so much to get the assigned reading done in time there was no way to digest it properly, especially with all the characters and mythology to study for context.
The second to last week went great because Sappho is just fragments and almost all of us had already read Beowulf in High School. The last week was Chaucer and thankfully she let us read the modern translation. We were all toast, and in no condition to rayed mayddel anglishe. She did read some of it out loud in class for us to hear the rhymes and all but there was no way we were going to make it through in just a few days before the final exam. I remember nothing that happened in the Canterbury Tales.
Luckily the final exam was a "pick a prompt and run with it" final, the exact kind I liked. Ten pages, cite lines from the poem etc. I went with the Gilgamesh one, got an A on the exam and a 75 or something in the class. If this had been a full length course I think we would all have had a much better time of getting through the stories and actually enjoying them somewhat. But every time I hear about Achilles, Odysseus, and Agamemnon I think about this class and the absolute chaos of trying to get through it in a little over a month.