The Chronicles of Prydain

Ok, so far, I've only read the first two, The Book of Three, and The Black Cauldron. They're not bad. I remember when my friend Scott read them in middle school - he loved them. He never forgave Disney for making the second book into a movie before the first one, but since I've never seen it...

The first introduces us to Taran, the assistant pig-keeper. What confused me was why they chose the title they did. The eponymous 'Book of Three' in the book is hardly mentioned. Taran sees his Lord looking at it, tries to touch it, gets shocked, and is gently chastised. That happens (I think) by Chapter 2, and then it's never seen again. But I guess this is a minor complaint. The story is fine, although it seems to wrap itself up rather quickly.

The Black Cauldron was a little better story, IMHO. It was easy to see how it would end up, but seeing as the book it 40+ years old, maybe it was a less known plot device then. I did like it better.

I am looking forward to reading the others, but am in no great hurry.

Tim McCarver's Diamond Gems

Finished this the other night. It had good and bad parts. Basically, it's a collection of anecdotes told to McCarver by various players over the years on (I think) Tim's sports talk show. As you'd expect from any collection of stories, some are good, some are boring, and some make you go 'WTF?". I found all the stories by players i knew to be much more interesting that the ones by people I don't, so if you're a huge baseball fan, you might get more out of it than I did.