Some of us wish to discover the secrets behind their subjects' success, as if, in these books, we might discover trusty principles to emulate in our own lives as striving leaders or artists or athletes or businesspeople.

Some of us yearn to grab up any available snippet or crumb of information about our personal icons. To learn the exact ingredients in Bette Davis' Aunt Edna's famous bologna custard somehow makes us feel closer to the diva herself.

I have recently made an acquaintance who is a diehard biography reader. He believes that, given his limited reading time, biography has more to offer him than fiction.

But I doubt that biographical lives are any truer than the fictional ones. Both are refined visions of "real life" filtered through a (theoretically) sensitive author — an author who analyzes and makes decisions and, ultimately, has hisown points to make. (Consider the scores of Thomas Jefferson biographers; they enshrine him, deplore him and everything in between.)

Both fiction writers and biographers present carefully selected elements of a real world crammed with more details than could ever be fit between covers. The least readable biographers, in fact, are so earnest in aiming for some mythic objectivitythat they lard their behemoth tomes with endless ephemera on the odd chance that the color of some famous figure's nursery school wallpaper, his favorite vegetable or preferred masturbatory technique might be some kind of rosetta stone. These booksend up as so much rosetta gravel, spread on paths winding this way and that through the garden, failing to offer strong interpretations of their subjects.

Piles of raw fact are uninteresting, except to starstruck obsessives and Hitler nuts. The best biographers imagine themselves into the world of their subjects, just as fiction writers imagine themselves into that of their characters, seeking outthose details that buzz with revelation, eliciting patterns and poetry from the million-sand grains of everyday existence.

Regular readers of this column know that my taste in books is a bowl of biblio-muesli: high-flown flakes of arcania, sweet lowbrow berries and the occasional kernel of what seems to be Truth. I make no assertion that novels and stories exist on somehigher ground than biography (given their often impermeable thickness, I'll even admit that bios do tend to stay crunchier in milk). I find a balanced diet most satisfying. I wish my bio-only friend would realize that he can try some other texturesand flavors without giving up any nutritional value.

A recent biography I thoroughly enjoyed is Utopia Parkway, Wall Street Journal art critic Deborah Solomon's journey into the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the artist best known for his glass-fronted boxes containing elliptical arraysof found objects, from rubber balls to cut-out pictures from movie magazines and astronomical maps. Film stars and galactic ones shared both an unattainable quality and an aching allure in Cornell's vision, which Solomon clearly but gently teasesout, scrupulously avoiding the impulse to sledgehammer readers with her conclusion.

Cornell, who throughout his adulthood lived with his mother and wheelchair-bound younger brother in the Bronx, commuted into the heart of the New York art world from the 1930s through the 1970s, crossing paths — and sharing styles — with everyonefrom Duchamp to de Kooning. He was obsessed with beautiful women, but died a virgin. He craved acceptance but often refused to sell or exhibit his work. His work defied characterization in its era — a sort of cross between collage and sculpture.

Solomon offers an invitation to share in speculations about her elusive subject (this is the first biography of Cornell, who died in 1972), coming off as a wise, insightful friend, not a self-congratulatory expert or lecturer. Early in the book,after an anecdote in which Cornell presents his grandfather with a load of bananas, Solomon notes, with characteristic casual humility:

"It's a curious detail, this surfeit of bananas. One might say that Cornell was beset by worries about manhood; or, alternately, that sometimes a banana is just a banana."

It is Solomon's constant awareness of alternate possibilities that renders her prose so comfortable and engaging. She conjures up Cornell with nuance and grace and — for all her impeccable research — never pretends to truly know her subject. Shetreats him almost as a poem, reading the rhymes and assonances, offering keen interpretations, but always recognizing that a human soul is much more than the sum of his analyzed parts.

As entrancingly cryptic in his person as in his art, Cornell seems especially suited to such poetic interpretation. In fact, the only other book ever dedicated to the artist is 1992's Dime Store Alchemy (Ecco Press), an eccentric tribute byMacArthur award-winning poet Charles Simic. This slim, pale purple volume offers bits of biography, prose poems and mini-essays inspired both by Cornell and by individual pieces of his art (like Solomon's book, it is well-illustrated with black andwhite photos) — all of these elements come together in a sort of multidimensional verbal collage, a prose approximation of Cornell's primary work style.

Both Simic and Solomon do a compelling job of approaching one medium with another. Neither writing nor visual art can ever fully embrace the other, but these authors impressively lead the two into a deeply passionate kiss.

Utopia Parkway is a great, fluid read. That's something that's particularly tough in biography. So often, the storytelling of a subject's life gets bogged down in analysis and historical background. Well-meaning authors can lose me with theirthoroughness, providing a herky-jerky night in the armchair rather than the sustained flow of my favorite books. Here are a few other relatively recent biographies that achieve this rare state (memoirs don't count, they're easy to make smooth):

—Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance , by Kenneth Silverman (HarperCollins)

—And the most compulsively readable biography I've ever encountered, Diane Arbus,by Patricia Bosworth (Avon).

As I write this, I realize that these titles all focus on writers or artists. But I knew basically nothing about their subjects until I read the books. I'd love to find similarly great reads about figures in sports, science, business, politics andother fields. Do you know of biographies that are so readable that they transcend their subjects' field? A book about a physicist that's so terrific that actors will enjoy reading it? The story of a head of state that could truly be enjoyed bysomeone who generally reads science fiction novels? Send your biography suggestions (with brief notes) to me here at City Paper or by e-mail to UpWord@aol.com. To be continued...

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