Anyway, frivolity aside, I thought I'd just write a mini-post on some of the changes you may have noticed here at Malone Towers (aka 'My Blog'). I've started making use of some of the features that the lovely people at Google have provided for me to make my little blog look pretty. I've messed around with colours, increased the font size, added labels for authors (in addition to countries) and put in a neat little search engine gadget which allows you to search the blog for mentions of the word 'banana' (go on, you know you want to).
I'm also toying with the idea of more little interim posts; of course, that's only possible when I'm in the middle of a monster like my present book. When I go back to normal (!) books, I'll probably have problems keeping up with the review posts, let alone writing extra posts to spread my pearls of wisdom across the breadth of the interweb thingy.
One final point: in browsing the many trillions of book blogs out there in cyberspace, I could hardly miss the fact that there seem to be a million and one different challenges going on. Hmm. While challenges are all well and good, I don't want to be penned in too much by what other people want, or expect, me to read. Therefore, I have developed my own monthly challenge to keep me on the straight and narrow (and so that I can say I'm doing a challenge. Even though I'm really not).
Tony's challenge is that each month I will read:
1) At least one Japanese novel.
2) At least one novel in a foreign language (i.e. French or German - Japanese would be pushing it unless you count the picture version of 'The Ugly Duckling' which I have hanging around somewhere in the house).
3) At least one big book - for the purposes of this challenge, that means 500+ pages.
4) No rubbish books.
The gauntlet has been thrown down (which was very silly as I'm only going to have to bend down and pick it up again): let the challenge begin!
Tomorrow; I'm very sleepy now.
