If your goal is to read Homer, I strongly recommend starting with Homer. I had the experience myself of getting to Homer after Attic and Koine and feeling like I couldn’t read a single line comfortably because the vocab is so different and you have to attune yourself to the word order and Homeric formulas. I nearly wept.
Pharr is a very good book as long as you don’t get demoralised which is easy to do. Modern language courses are full of exercises and tips in colourful boxes and photos of happy tourists scoffing ice cream. Pharr is extremely dense because it was written to be padded out by a teacher in the classroom with explanations and tests, but if you take your time and really try to master the material then it gets you to where you need to be.
The website Homeric Greek Resources has lots of additional material for each unit of the 4th Edition of Pharr (interactive tests, recordings, videos, flashcards) which might help to reinforce the contents of each chapter. By the end of the book you should be able to read Homer (slowly, slowly) with a commentary and dictionary. Expectation management is key. Quickly reading through a passage of 50 lines you’ve spent a good chunk of time working through with full comprehension is extremely satisfying, though. See that as the goal.
We had a little Odyssey reading group on here a while ago, which you might be interested to look through at some point. If you click on ‘More information about the group’ you’ll be able to see all the threads. As part of it, I made a list of all the free Homer resources I could find. Geoffrey Steadman’s free pdfs of parts of the Iliad and Odyssey with lots of grammar and vocab notes are a really good way to start reading your first real Homer beyond Pharr.
Hope some of that helps!
Sean