IF YOU ATTENDED THE FIRST BENLIT SALON that focused on literary characters, I hope you’ll return for the second. It’ll be upstairs at the First Street Café, 440 First St., on Monday, beginning at 7 in the evening. The theme is beginnings — the reader’s burden, the writer’s bane — so I hope to see you at the next salon with some novel or short story beginnings that you love or hate. Certainly, if you don’t come with your beginnings, our salon beginnings will miss your contribution.

This will be an especially difficult salon because of the subject matter — beginnings — so if I seem to be pleading for help, you have that exactly right. To tackle beginnings without assistance would be a fool’s project.

I say this because beginnings are hard for both readers and writers — but let’s consider the former first.

Most proper readers start at the beginning, read through the middle, and keep going until they get to the end. As you may remember, this is the King’s advice to the White Rabbit when reading evidence against the Knave who allegedly ate the tarts in Alice’s journey through Wonderland. And good advice it is, too.

Such honorable readers don’t Google a plot synopsis before they start. They don’t beg their friends to tell them what happens. Though we all know those who cheat, those who jump to some place in the middle then on to the end, skipping all the important words in between, we also know that these readers live beyond the pale, violating all rules of decorum.

I mean, would they do the same with a movie — skip to the final few minutes to see how it ends before deciding whether to watch it? Would they record a game and then check to see which team won before deciding to watch from the beginning?

Well . . . now that I think about it, I do this. Really, why would I want to start from the beginning if I knew the A’s or Giants were going to lose?

Nonetheless, I’m not proud of my behavior. I know such actions are deplorable. So let us stipulate that readers who cheat are not to be considered further. We need worry ourselves only with those who follow the King’s rules by starting at the beginning.

Nonetheless, there’s a problem for the righteous reader, for if the beginning doesn’t deliver that something special, that je ne sais quoi that leaves the reader wanting to know what happens next, the reader may never get past the first sentence in the first paragraph on the first page. This is exactly why “It was a dark and stormy night” is considered a no-no beginning. And most unfortunately, if the reader doesn’t make it past the beginning, guilt and inferiority may be this reader’s burden until the end of his or her miserable, unfulfilled life.

The reasons why are clear, for this reader will never be able to claim he has read Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a six-volume work that totals more than three thousand pages. If you’re a slow reader like me, taking a few minutes per page, you’re looking at more than 9,000 minutes, more than 150 hours — about a week straight of reading without a break. And how does this famous work begin? “For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’”

Are you kidding me? This is why Proust’s volumes have become my reader’s burden, accumulating guilt deep in my graveyard of books yet unread. For I need books that start with real trouble, not insomnia.

Consider the beginning of Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl”: “The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.”

While not as somnolent as Proust — I like the historical reference, and would like to be sipping wine right now on the banks of the Thames or Tiber — it’s not exactly what I need when “It’s been a hard day’s night / and I’ve been working like a dog . . .” grading fundamental English papers that hardly ever, almost never have a good beginning like this one by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

But is Henry James writing about trouble, the kind of trouble in Meredith Wilson’s River City? “Ya got trouble, folks! / Right here in River City! / Trouble, with a capital T / And that rhymes with P / And that stands for pool!” Maybe — but I may never know since the tome lies buried, waiting for enough time to be disinterred.

But there’s never enough time, for time is growing short, shorter each day, as more and more books with marginal beginnings are written and purchased and checked out from the library only to be set aside and never read.

Which is why murder and mayhem work best. Consider the beginning of Toni Morrison’s “Jazz: “Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.”

Now that’s a beginning! But have I read the novel? Not yet, but I know it’s my fault, my burden — for who could resist reading on after such a beginning?

This is why beginnings are the writer’s bane, because the writer, it seems to me, only has two choices: She can be as famous as Proust so that readers will buy her books but never read them, or she can start each work with a beginning that so engages the reader that he can’t stop reading.

This, then, is the serious issue we need to address in our next BenLit salon. So bring your examples, good and bad, and let us have at them.

Dave Badtke teaches English at Solano Community College and is a Benicia Literary Arts board member.