In college, I was an English major. The immortal words of Lewis Caroll carried me through many a panicked night in college, when successfully writing the first sentence of my paper seemed slightly less likely than my odds of winning the lottery. How do you begin a paper, a column, any written expression of personal thought when you’re faced with all that white space to fill?

To answer that question, Caroll provided me with the most helpful advice I’ve ever heard: “Start from the beginning, proceed to the end, then stop.”

So here we are, the first column of the Literary Life, ready to talk about the beginning. I don’t think it starts with BookSwim, the concept of online rental, or the older concept of book rental itself. Why are we here writing this?

For me, it starts with those agonizing nights in college staring at the screen. I spent hours finding the perfect way to talk about Nabokov’s sentences, and I drank a lot of coffee so I could spend all night thinking about books.

It’s been a few years since my last paper deadline, but I’ve kept the urgency of those late nights with me. Books are never just about grades, or even their characters, styles or authors. We read to experience another person’s mind from the inside out, to remember what we could never learn in our own lives. Books are about sharing the recorded experiences of humanity, and when we pause to engage in the necessarily slower act of reading, it is always a search for meaning, a defiance of fast-paced superficial modern lifestyles.

That’s the beginning: the act of pausing to read and think, or in my case, being paralyzed for hours finding the right thing to say. Whichever flips your pages, we’re here to talk about books and reading, and here we are.

So, the debut column. This is in no way daunting, I assure you. It’s not as if I have a mountain of expectation up to which I must live.

Sure, I could write about the book I’m reading, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or I could explain the relationship between Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids and the role they play in maintaining, among other things, healthy blood pressure (the passage I most recently finished)…I could even sheepishly admit that I’ve been reading this book, a little at a time, for the past 4 months (though, admittedly, I’ve read three other books during that time, as well).

However, I have decided to utilize this opportunity to shamelessly plug that this new column is a weekly (Thursdays) part of the new BookSwim feature, “The Literary Life,” and that I’ll also be co-hosting a weekly podcast (Mondays) with fellow columnist and BookSwim vet, Chip.

So, come back often, see what’s going on, and take a genuine interest in what I have to say because, after this week’s first column, I anticipate having more to say than just the sheer fact that I have something to say. Also, dependent upon which of my former girlfriends you talk to, I may or may not be starved for attention (Hint: I am). I have something to say! Find out what, next week.