OU CAN download some of Elpenor's bilingual texts and work with them. Except for your love and discipline, which you must provide, all you need, you have it on-line. Just buy a good dictionary; Liddell-Scott is available from Perseus, and you can save it for off-line study in pdf.

Don't get a smaller dictionary than Liddell-Scott, which is already small enough: from Diels we know that Ancient Greek words are ten times the Latin words, so that a Greek dictionary should have 120 volumes - without Byzantine and Modern Greek!

If you think Homer is unfit for beginners, you should read Clyde Pharr's Homer and the study of Greek, where sound reasons are given why Homer is the best possible preparation for all later Greek literature. Pharr's Homeric Greek can also be your first textbook, whether you study alone or in a study group, and you can use the recent, revised, print version of 1985, or download in pdf format the first (1918) edition.