An I Spy Weekly Link Round-Up

You can probably tell altogether too much about a person from looking at his desk. That's why I'm only going to show you a very small part of mine!

Now that I take a good look at this photo, I see that there's an unopened bottle of eyedrops that I no longer need. Christmas Day was the first day since August that I didn't have a regimen of drops to put in my eyes. (Don't you love the timing?) It's been over a week now, and I'm still finding it strange not to have to line up the bottles first thing in the morning.

The photo also shows me that I have Christmas messages that I still have to take care of. (Thank you so much, You-Know-Who-You-Are!) And you can see one of the seven pairs of El Cheapo reading glasses that I bought for myself. Yes, the purple ones stay here at my desk. The red ones are on my bedside table. The candy cane-striped ones are in the bathroom. The blue ones are in the craft room. The tortoiseshell in my purse. The green-blue-and-yellow-striped ones are by my chair in the family room/kitchen, and the black-and-white zebra-striped ones are just in case I lose one of the others.

I'm still loving my new eyeballs and continue to be thrilled with my distance vision. There's been a learning curve getting used to not being able to see close up without glasses, but that's what all those readers scattered throughout the house are for. Who knows? I may continue collecting reading glasses if I can find them in the right strength and suitably colorful frames!

Have a fabulous 2019, everyone!

►Books & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• Interesting interview: I'm novelist Ausma Zehanat Khan, and this is how I work.
• Polis Books is launching a diversity-focused crime imprint called Agora Books.
• Starz has acquired Dublin Murders, a crime drama based on Tana French's novels. 
• What's behind a recent rise in books coverage?
• Why doesn't America love the novella?
• The tricky business of balancing humor and crime, according to Christopher Fowler.
• How an unlikely family history website transformed cold case investigations.
• The first criminal trial that used fingerprints as evidence.

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• The ring of Roman governor Pontius Pilate who crucified Jesus has been found in the Herodian site on the West Bank.
• This 4,000-year-old pot spent years as a toothbrush holder.
• A dress worn by Princess Diana is on sale for $125,000 twenty-four years after it was bought for just $250.
• Explore Vermeer's surviving paintings, together after all this time, in one virtual exhibition.
• Take a virtual murder tour of medieval London.
• No, wait, this is the real Ava, a Bronze Age woman from the Scottish Highlands.
• Found near the Thames: a centuries-old skeleton, still wearing thigh-high boots. 
• An ancient case of the plague could rewrite history.

►Channeling My Inner Elly Mae Clampett◄

• Excessive Vitamin D in pet food may be making dogs sick. 
• Parrot genes reveal why the birds are so clever and long-lived. 
• Researchers have created the first-ever honey bee vaccine. 
• The Nairobi Animal Orphanage in Nairobi National Park is the oldest of its kind in Kenya.
• How did the "Great Dying" kill 96% of Earth's ocean-dwelling creatures?
• A photographer's quest to document the last of the rainforest caribou.
• Adelie penguins poop so much, their feces can be seen from space. (Did the astronauts call down and ask someone to find out what it was?)
• The tiny Florida butterfly that refuses to become extinct.

►The Happy Wanderer◄

• Urueña, a charming, medieval walled village, is Spain's first book town.
• There are more than fifty historic buildings in Port Townsend, Washington (and it's a place I love to visit).

►Fascinating Folk◄

• Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th-century female naturalist, has had a new butterfly species named after her.

►I ♥ Lists◄

• Here are the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of the last one hundred years.
• CrimeReads' sixty-two favorite crime books of 2018.
• A "neutral" Mormon mysteries reading list.
• The most inspiring books of all time according to BookBub readers.
• Sixteen great dystopian books from the past twenty-five years.
• Sixteen libraries that look like Hogwarts in real life.
• The twenty best crime novels of 2018.
• Best of the West 2019: Western books.

That's all for this week! Don't forget to stop by next Friday when I'll be sharing a freshly selected batch of links for your surfing pleasure.

Have a great weekend, and read something fabulous!