The Odyssey

Because the last thing you want to do when you get back from a trip is to take out the trash.

The Odyssey is the sequel to Homer's Illiad and it focuses on the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his son, Telemachus, while Odysseus makes his way back from Troy.  Following the defeat of the Trojans, some of the Greeks failed to make all the proper offerings-among them Odysseus and his crew.  As punishment Odysseus and his crew are blown off course and forced to wander the Mediterranean (really much more than that, unless the gates to Hell are located somewhere in that region and no one informed me).  When Odysseus fails to return home in a reasonable amount of time, his wife Penelope and son are besieged by suitors who take advantage of the fact that Odysseus is away to woo his wife and eat his food.  Eventually Telemachus gets frustrated with the ill-manored suitors and sets out to find his father's true fate.  Meanwhile, Odysseus returns to civilization and arranges a ship to his home of Ithaca.  He returns and sneaks his way back into his home so that the suitors do not know who he is.  Odysseus, his son and trusted members of his staff arrange for a trap to kill off the suitors.  The trap works and Odysseus reclaims his rightful spot as the king of Ithaca.

When people think of an exciting read that's hard to put down, two and a half millenia old epic poetry probably doesn't come to mind, but it should.  The Odyssey is surprisingly gripping.  Odysseus, the plaything of the gods, constantly finds himself in bad situation to bad situation and part of the fun is finding out how he'll get out of it with his clever wit (or divine help, but mostly the cleverness).  Seriously, he can be quite clever.  Telling people his name is Nobody, because then Nobody hurt them.  Finding a way so that he alone has weapons when he needs to kill the suitors.  He's quite ingenious. 

Penelope's character gets forgotten in the story's telling.  She has two major accomplishments in the entire narrative.  Delaying the suitors by way of her weaving and staying faithful.  And that's apparently something pretty big in Greek story telling.  Of the other  two married female characters the one that gets the most lines is an adulteress who killed her husband upon his return from Troy.  I'm going to assume Homer was not the most progressive thinkers when it came to female characters.