AKICILJ: the bitter green edition

timprov has already done the grocery shopping this morning, because he is efficient like that, and he has returned home with beets. Red beets! Golden beets! We have beets. We also have plans for beets.

What we do not have plans for, but have quantities of anyway, is beet greens. They come attached to the beets. They are huge and luxurious and occupying more of our fridge than I really expected.

Does anybody know of anything nice that can be done with beet greens? My mother is not fond of this type of green, so my first line of culinary inquiry is not helping this time around. I like recipes, but I also like "cook 'em for awhile with some of this and some of that" level of specificity--does not have to be measured in tablespoons. (Or coffee spoons. Or T.S. Eliot.) (Bonus points for T.S. Eliot, though.)

Westmark book discussion: suggestions for supplemental reading?

As the person who is hosting the Westmark trilogy book discussion--and as someone who is a complete sucker for This Sort Of Thing for widely varying values of This Sort Of Thing--I was thinking about reading some other books for comparison/contrast/other discussion purposes. Any ideas what goes well with the Westmark trilogy? I have a couple of books on the French Revolution at the ready, and I was thinking maybe The Prisoner of Zenda and Teckla and Night Watch (Terry Pratchett, not the other one) and Brokedown Palace. Other ideas for what might make interesting idea stew?

Once upon a--no, that's not it either.

I don't know why I have this happen every time I write a book: every time I write a beginning, and every time I have to rewrite the beginning to remove the colossal suck from it. Why is this? I could not say. I can begin short stories without the Suckitude That Ate Golden Valley coming and rearing its head every time. But novels, no. Never. Evereverever. Why not? I could not say. I write out of sequence, so you'd think maybe just once. But no.

I fear that this one owes a bit too much in structure/cadence to a certain formative book of my youth, but there aren't any sea serpents, so it has to spill out somewhere.

At any rate, I have been trying for, no kidding, months to get this right--the vertigo slows the process, and I've been working on other things--and now I have one sentence. Just one. But I think it'll get all the rest. I think it'll do.

And now there will be ice cream.