The Odyssey books 5-12

I now realize why people have said that The Odyssey is boring. Although, I don't find it as boring as they over exaggeratedly explained it to be, it's become preggressively slower and more painful to read.

The one thing I now find the most confusing is the dialogue. This story is so chock-full of dialogue there are pages of just one person speaking! Sometimes while reading the immense amounts of dialogue I get confused as to who is speaking. Typically, Ulysses is reluctant but wil tell the story of his whole voyage to anyone who asks. Which after a while, becomes a little redundant and makes the story boring. Also, the old English they use is sometimes confusing. If it weren't for the reading strategy my English teacher had taught me, it would be more of a struggle to remember who was talking.

While reading books 6 and 7, I made a connection to Rick Riordan's books The House of Hades and the whole Percy Jackson series in general. In book 6, Minerva made Ulysses look taller, stronger and gave him a new set of thick curly hair. In The House of Hades, the character Frank Zhang is a son of Mars (Ares) who is the god of war. Frank completed a task that proved to his father that he was a strong warrior. So, Mars made his son look taller and stronger just like Ulysses. In book 7, Minerva created a cloud of mist to hide Ulysses from the questioning townsfolk. In the Percy Jackson series, there is this magical substance called the mist. The mist shrouds monsters from the mortals eyes.

A reoccurring theme in this book was this quote: " When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared...". This qoute appeared in the book estimatedly more than 10 times. And I've only read the first 13 books! This qoute has bothered me enough to research what it means and I got this: 

"Originally, The Odyssey was not written down but remembered-all of it, in Greek. This repeated phrase was an aid to memory for the person reciting the book. It also was a way in the Greek to fill out the line syllabically. The Odyssey was not written in paragraphs; that is a modern invention or concept of the translator. The Odyssey was written in lines of verse. The Greeks saw the world as controlled by forces that were roughly analogous to humans. By making dawn into a person, the persona-as-metaphor-for-larger forces is continued. And of course dawn is the beginning of day and a child suggests the beginning of life or a day, so the metaphor is appropriate that way." I think this answer makes a lot of sense. It would've taken me a while to find the deeper meaning in that one sentence.