Hit the wall

Well, I have ground spectacularly to a halt. Halfway through Sirach, I just couldn't take any more and stopped.
To tell the truth, I haven't been enjoying the Apocrypha anything like as much as I enjoyed reading the Bible last year, and that's why I have thrown in the towel.
Trying to analyse what it is that I don't like, I've come up with two things. There is a powerful (and to me, unpleasant) sense of nationalism in the books I've read; and secondly, there is so much less quality. What I've read so far really is second rate.
Take Judith, for example. It came highly recommended to me by a previous colleague who extolled it as a wonderfully empowering story for women. I'm afraid I just thought that Judith's opponents were stupid, and that she herself was so one-sided a character she didn't appeal to me. She didn't come across as a real woman, and her adversary general Holofernes didn't come across as a real man. They were cartoon figures going through the motions. In the end, all that was left was the sense that We Are Israel, and We Are Right.
The books are also legendary and fantastical. The events described are hard to believe, the advice given is dodgy. Why believe this stuff?
Sorry, Apocrypha, you've lost me.