This week I started reading Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan. While I haven’t made enough headway to fully recommend the book, I came across something I quite liked early on  when the protagonist, Serena Frome, describes her reading tastes.

My needs were simple. I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end. Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. Conrad was beyond my consideration, as were most stories by Kipling and Hemingway. Nor was I impressed by reputations. I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and anything in between—I gave them all the same rough treatment.

For the most part, I share these preferences.  I have mentioned before, I think, that duty rarely factors into my reading choices.  Like Serena, I care little for names or reputations. I read across genres; want genuine, relatable characters; and I wholeheartedly agree that books/movies without women/girls (of which there are far too many, in my opinion) are “lifeless deserts.”  I am also admittedly if embarrassingly romantic.  I like a love story, and I rarely read (or write) anything without one.

While I do read very fast and skim unnecessary descriptions, I can appreciate “themes” on occasion if they don’t overshadow plot too much.  I also can set aside other preferences if the writing is particularly beautiful, or there are symbols to decode.  Otherwise, her statement could just as well be mine.  Can you relate to this as well?  What are your reading preferences?

I came across a biography for Leonard Cohen recently, and since he was already on the brain (thanks to another great internet celebrity death hoax) I picked it up and started reading.

Only in recent years have I begun a tentative toe-dipping back into the waters of the biography after becoming mostly disillusioned with the genre during my school days.  Back then, any assignment to research some figure of choice  became a quest, in my mind, to find a hero–someone I could hold up as a standard, whose life philosophy I could adopt and whose picture I could hang on my wall.

Inevitably, I came up disappointed– Shakespeare was likely an adulterer with questionable authorship, Beethoven a moody, unfaithful misanthrope, and even the seemingly flawless Audrey Hepburn was sometimes troubled and possibly anorexic.  I became frustrated with what I deemed the disparity between the lives and the work of my favorite artists, and in the long run, decided I’d just rather not know their life details–instead remaining happily naive of the flaws and challenges of such persons of note.

It is only lately that I have returned to the genre–with a rather altered view. Therefore, picking up Leonard Cohen’s biography the other day had little to do with any quest for a hero.  In fact, I can safely say that not only am I no Cohen expert, but anyone would be hard-pressed to even call me much of a fan.  I am only vaguely familiar with his songs, and know next to nothing of him and his career as a singer/songwriter/author.  My interest in the man lies in the fact that he was responsible for penning, in a few lines of song lyrics, words that have not only been immensely significant to me, but have become a sort of life philosophy.  These are from his song, “Anthem.”

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

These lyrics express why my philosophy toward biography has changed over years.  I used to believe that the value in any life existed solely in its merits–its smooth, unblemished surfaces.  However, as Cohen so accurately suggests–there is no such thing as “unblemished” in ordinary humanity: “There is” rather, “a crack in everything.  And, not only are the cracks, the flaws, the mistakes inevitable, but they are necessary.  They are “how the light gets in,” the light of experience, wisdom, humility, redemption, and hope.

So, perhaps it is the pain of error, the carrying of personal shortcomings, the long weary wading through the muddy paths of life that allowed these people to create art–to forget their own impossible “perfect offering” and in pressing forward in a flawed, human way, to make room for something divine.