WordPress styling recent post

You can just list them as a list regularly, and style them with css

li:nth-child(even) { background: #000 }
li:nth-child(odd) { background: #CCC }

If you are worried about browser support you could add different classes when you’re populating the list in PHP using $i or something like

for($i = 0; $i < count($list); $i++) {
  echo '<li class="'.($i %2 == 0 ? 'blackrow' : 'greyrow').'">'.$title.'</li>';
}

Or if you’re using while() then just do $i = 0; before the while and add $i++ at the end of the while loop.

The php code probably has some errors because I have no means to test now and just threw that up from the top of the dome, and I’m not so great with code. But it should give you an idea.