Monotony is a very simple feed reader. It does exactly one job: you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds, Monotony checks for news every minute. News are displayed on the desktop as notifications, featuring the headline and a summary (if there's one). To read a news item in your default web browser, just click on the notification.
There is nothing else. No Google Reader sync, no frontend, no possibility to customize it. Monotony runs as a menubar app or, if you choose, invisible in the background. That's all. Monotony has been designed to blend with Growl, the desktop notification system, and with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion's Notification Center.