Get lost!

This, then, is an ancient text "traditionally attributed to the Homerids, epic poets who claimed to be descended from Homer." But the book is encrypted, the key to the code lost. Fortunately, a cryptographer, bored with separating "the static-filled walkie-talkie conversations of Islamic radicals . . . from the background radio signal generated by the Aurora Borealis," broke the code. The translation, he warns, is highly speculative, perhaps illusory.

"The essential insight," Mason writes in one of the 46 short chapters that follow -- the lost books themselves -- "is that the text is corrupt, or, if not corrupt, then incomplete, or of a calculated obscurity." So don't look for certainties. Look to get lost. Mason lets Odysseus compose "The Odyssey." He gives Achilles a chance to speak, and even Eumaios, the loyal swineherd who helps Odysseus slaughter Penelope's suitors and maids.

He has Homer dream of refineries. He sends Odysseus to China, to Hades, to psychoanalysis. He makes him a sorcerer and Achilles a golem crafted from river mud and a slave girl's blood. He lets Odysseus return to Ithaca to find it abandoned, to find Penelope a ghost, or worse, married to a fat old man: " . . . it had never occurred to him that she would just give up." Odysseus' journeys never end. Or maybe they never begin. Maybe, instead, the war never ends, and Agamemnon ages in a fortress dug beneath Troy's sand beaches that expands "dendritically, sending off new shoots in all directions" as avalanches reclaim whole wings. Mason delights in doubles, spirals, conceptual mazes and Mobius strips. He is only occasionally too clever. Mainly, he is a wondrous pleasure to read.

Huler's "No-Man's Lands" does not benefit from comparison. It is, to be just, a different breed of book entirely. Huler set out to trace Odysseus' storm-tossed journey from Troy to Ithaca, to crisscross the Mediterranean, visiting the sites associated with everyone from Calypso to the Cyclops Polyphemus. But he suffers from the most lethal disease of travel writers -- the urge to render the unfamiliar familiar, to masticate the strange and spit it back as pablum. ("Think of the Greeks as a football team . . .") Like a beagle snorting after chicken nuggets kicked beneath the couch, Huler seeks out tidy lessons to share with the folks at home. Worse, he finds them.

"Peer through the veneer of fantasy," Huler writes, "and 'The Odyssey' is a book about stuff we know: girls and bad guys; jobs and responsibilities; friends, coworkers, and family." He's right, of course. Peer at that veneer long enough and you'll see, well, yourself. But then, why bother looking? Why not save the cash, take the bus to the mall instead?

Sometimes the Odyssey feels old. There are other stories, aren't there? How did Tennyson's Ulysses put it? Oh, yes: "Come, my friends, / 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."