Today’s TTT is “ten books I randomly grabbed from my shelf”, but I wanted to see if the chatGPT version of Bing could choose ten random items from a list, so I gave it my 70+ strong TBR list. Then I decided to ask Bard, too. BUUUT FIRST — Teaser Tuesday Time.

‘You’ve seen the officers and the men of the Illyrian cohort. Thoughts?’
‘If I may speak freely, sir?’
‘Please do.’
‘They’re a useless shower. They don’t march in step, they don’t look after their kit and they don’t look after themselves. Some of them are old enough to be my grandad, and others are young enough to be my son. Gods forbid, but if it comes to a fight, the only danger they pose is that the enemy may die laughing at the ——– spectacle presented by Centurion Fortunus and his men. Other than that, they’re a fine body of men who do the emperor proud, sir.’

Britannia, Simon Scarrow

The ten random items were: The Sun in the Church, an analysis of cathedrals as observatories; The Outlaw Ocean, an exploration of some of the stories the contemporary ocean has to tell us (a mix of crime, science, adventure); The Food of the Gods, an H.G. Wells title; The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation, which is a history about the Big Muddy; The Book Thief, which features Death as the narrator; The War Against Boys, which I think is on how educational policies in the 1990s were were starting to privilege girls over boys; The Secret Chord I know nothing about; The Life of Johnny Reb is a social history of the average Confederate soldier; Crypto is a tech history about how PGP and the like arose; and The Sunne in Splendour is English medieval historical fiction.

So, I decided to let Bard have a go well. And interestingly, Bard looked the items up. I gave it the same simplified list (titles only, no subtitles or authors), and this is what it gave me.

Now, because it was only going off of main titles, almost all of these have inaccurate details — but I hadn’t asked for them at all. Quite a surprise. Bing is superior in general, but Bard is a little more fun. For the image-impaired, and ignoring Bard’s errors, the Bard list was: Merchants and Moneymen, a history of the medieval commercial revolution; What the Dormouse Said, on the 1960s and computer tech; Faces Along the Bar, about working men and bars; Empire, a history of Spain’s explosion from Fatimid victim to world power; The War of 1812, a massive history of the war that also incorporates the Creek wars; The Life of Johnny Reb, a social history of Confederate soldiers; a history of the Big Muddy; a social history of the Victorian age, and a history of British soldiers in the American Revolution. There were two overlapping items, The Life of Johnny Reb and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation.