Month: March 2009

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Other

Awards

iloveyourblog Margot from Joyfully Retired kindly gave me this I love Your Blog Award – Thank you Margot!

She has just moved her blog across to new premises, and if you haven’t seen it yet, then you should pop across, as it is so clean and fresh – well done Margot!

 

 

 

divertingBelle of the Books awarded me this Excessively Diverting Bog Award – thank you! I hadn’t visited this blog until I received the award, so it came as a very pleasant surprise!

 

 

 

 

 

There are lots of blogs which I love – you’ll know who you are if I comment on your blog regularly!  I’d like to pass the I Love Your Blog Award onto some blogs which I have found recently.

My Cozy Book Nook – We seem to have very similar reading tastes. Please visit her blog, as she has some great reviews, and recently wrote a great article on the kindle.

Savidge Reads – He’s the only other blogger I’ve found who is also completing the Richard & Judy 2009 list – we may not agree on how good the books are, but his reviews are always thought provoking.

Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? – She has some great posts! The picture of the lady pregnant with octuplets is a random example! I also need to thank her for recommending Blindness to me.

Book Gazing has the most honest reviews I have seen recently. I love honesty!

Bibliophile by the Sea always seems to be reading great books! She has added to more books to my wishlist than anyone else recently. Where does she find them all?!

If I have given you an award, please don’t feel you have to blog about it, or pass it on – I just want you to know that I Love Your Blogs!

Categories
Blog Improvement Project Other

How to put boxes around your text – an idiot’s guide!

I have spent the afternoon learning how to put boxes around text in wordpress. It has taken me a while, because all the guides out there seem to require a basic understanding of html – which I don’t have!

So I thought I’d share my new found knowledge with you.

This is called ‘inline CSS’ so you add this html code into your post (the alternative is external CSS, but I haven’t worked this out yet!).

If you copy the following html and paste it into your text editor you will get a black box around your text:

<p style=”padding:6px; color: grey; background-color: white; border: black 2px solid”>Text</p>

Text

Changing the number after the padding changes the distance between the text and the box, for example changing it to 10px makes the box further from the text.

 <p style=”padding: 10px; color: grey; background-color: white; border: black 2px solid”>Text</p>

Text

The word color refers to the text. As far as I can tell you can just write the colour of text you want, and it works. For example I have now changed it to red.

 <p style=”padding: 10px; color: red; background-color: white; border: black 2px solid”>Text</p>

Text

The blackground-colour is the colour of the filled in box. I have now changed it to blue:

 <p style=”padding: 10px; color: red; background-color: blue; border: black 2px solid”>Text</p>

Text

The border is the colour of the border, so here I’ve changed it to green.

 <p style=”padding: 10px; color: red; background-color: blue; border: green 2px solid”>Text</p>

Text

The number after the border colour is the thickness of the border. Increasing the number increases the width of the border. Here I’ve increased it to 5px.

 <p style=”padding: 10px; color: red; background-color: blue; border: green 5px solid”>Text</p>

Text

And of course you can change the text to anything you like!

<p style=”padding: 10px; color: red; background-color: blue; border: green 5px solid”>anything you like!</p>

anything you like!

I’m not sure all colour changes are improvements, but it gives you an idea of how it works!

I look forward to seeing lots of brightly coloured boxes on your blogs in the future!

Categories
Other Weekly Geeks

Weekly Geeks – Quote of the Day

This weeks Weekly Geek task is to add a quote a day to your blog. I’m going to base all my quotes on reading.

To start with here’s one of my favourite quotes:

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
~Groucho Marx~

Categories
Richard and Judy Book Club

Netherland – Joseph O’Neill

I’m afraid that life is too short to persevere with boring books, and this one succumbed very quickly. By page two I was wondering why I was reading it (the answer is that Richard and Judy made me do it!) I managed to get through to page fifty with a bit of effort, and then skim read the next 100 pages, before giving up entirely.

I’m not a fan of watching sport, and cricket has to be one of the dullest there is. A book about trying to build a cricket stadium in New York is going to have a very tough job exciting me, and I’m afraid it didn’t. The book is also supposed to be a reflection on the post 9/11 life of New Yorkers, but the little I read didn’t engage me.

I’m afraid this book just wasn’t for me. It was as exciting as a five day cricket test match!

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Categories
1990s Books in Translation Nobel Prize Recommended books

Blindness – José Saramago

Translated from the Portugese by Giovanni Pontiero

Blindness is the most powerful book I have ever read. From the beginning, to the end my adrenaline levels were high, and my heart was beating so fast you’d have thought I’d been out running!

Blindness is a terrifying account of what could happen to us, if we were all to lose our sight. The book begins with one man suddenly losing his vision while waitng at traffic lights in his car. Someone offers to help the blind man back home, and it isn’t long before he becomes blind too. It quickly becomes obvious that the blindness is highly contagious, and so all the blind people, and those who have been in close contact with them, are rounded up and sent to an old mental hospital. Trapped in this old building, with an increasing number of people, conditions quickly deteriorate. Fights break out over the small amount of food, sanitation becomes almost non-existent, and it isn’t long before people are dying.

There is one woman who has not gone blind; she lied in order to stay with her husband. At first it seems as though she is the lucky one, but as time goes on this is not necessarily true. Would it be better to be blind than to see the horrors that are all around her?

This book is worryingly realistic. What would our governments do if there was an epidemic of blindness? How quickly would society break down? I thought I’d be able to cope without electricity, but when you stop to think about the infrastructure, you realise how soon you’d run out of food, and water. It’s enough to make me want to move to the country and become self sufficient as soon as possible!

This book took a little bit of time to get used to. The characters are all nameless, and there is little punctuation to break up the paragraphs, so the text is unusually dense. It was, however, completely gripping from beginning to end. I’m not sure I can say that I enjoyed reading it though. It will stay with me for a long time, and is a powerful statement about the fragility of our society, but I’m not sure enjoyable is the right word!

Highly recommended, as long as you can cope with the stress!

José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998.

Categories
Meme

Booking Through Thursday – The Best Book You’ve Never Read

btt button

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question is: 

We’ve all seen the lists, we’ve all thought, “I should really read that someday,” but for all of us, there are still books on “The List” that we haven’t actually gotten around to reading. Even though we know they’re fabulous. Even though we know that we’ll like them. Or that we’ll learn from them. Or just that they’re supposed to be worthy. We just … haven’t gotten around to them yet.

 What’s the best book that YOU haven’t read yet?

I don’t like reading all the books by my favourite authors at once, as I like to savour  them. Sometimes, when I go through a stage of reading a few bad books in a row, I like to know that I can pick up a book knowing it will be great. These are a few of the books I’m most looking forward to reading:
  •  Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
  • The Post Birthday World – Lionel Shriver
  • The Night Watch – Sarah Waters
  • Outlander – Diana Gabaldon

I’m also really intrigued by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but I’m not convinced they will be in the same league.

Do you think I’ll enjoy all of the books in my list, or is there one lurking there that will not live up to my expectations?

I’d love to hear from you!