It’s around this time of year, when the nostalgia of another year elapsed grabs us, that otherwise levelheaded media outlets resort to screaming hyperbole and announce their BEST OF lists. Indeed, there are so many of these lists, it can be hard to construe meaning from this veritable slush of cultural endorsements. And so many will rush to the pages, checking their membership in the cultural intelligentsia, stacking their consumption up against the litterati. Did I read/watch/listen/consume enough of the popularly celebrated cultural output in 2009? Is my space within the liberal academic elite safe? Do I even care?

David Sedaris has a list of his favorite reads, the New York Times can’t seem to agree long enough to publish just one for books, movies, or music (lest we forget their harebrained hope to appeal to African-Americans with a “Gifts of Color” section), and Time produces a 10 Best Songs list that stacks Brooklyn indie Grizzly Bear up with Kelly Clarkson (along the way, confusing both hipsters and pop tartlets who never liked to be lumped together). In doing so, what have they really accomplished? They’ve taken the private ritual of consuming art and culture and subjugated it to a status match.

I liked Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, though I suspect even Ms. Moore is just a touch happier to count Janet Maslin, David Sedaris, or the staff at Amazon.com among her latest work’s fans than some schnook with a meager internet presence. I’m happy Ms. Moore is getting all the buzz she rightfully deserves for a stellar work of fiction, but the slope of consuming culture—reading books, for example—not as a private act of reader and writer, but as a perversion of ‘cool’ is a slippery one indeed.

Read, eat, listen, watch as your own best critic. Consume it all. Then, and perhaps only then, will you have found, the very best of everything.