Aaron Hamburger is the author of THE VIEW FROM STALIN'S HEAD and FAITH FOR BEGINNERSRecently I logged on to the New York Times website and found an article purporting to answer the question: "What is the best work of American fiction of the last twenty-five years?" Below this triumphal headline, I found five titles listed, the one at the top designated as "The Winner"; the four below were somewhat dolefully classified as "The Runners-Up."

After making sure I wasn't looking at the USA Today website, I found myself puzzled as to how to interpret the information given to me by this article. For example, what is the significance of the numbers five and twenty-five? Why examine only books that had been published in the past twenty-five years as opposed to twenty-four, twenty-six, thirty, forty-seven, or eight? And why were the top five candidates given special recognition? Why not the top three or ten or twelve? Is it the contention of the New York Times Book Review that works of art can only properly be understood when related to numbers that occur in multiples of five?

Also, why were the winners announced without any comment or explanation (other than links to their original Times reviews)? It's as if the choice of these works and not others was so clear that no explanation was needed, in which case, one has to wonder why the Times would go to the bother of the whole exercise. Why confer more honors on books that have already been amply honored?

Finally, what is the purpose of ranking works of literature like top 40 hits? How is the reduction of the serious business of literary criticism to an offering of bite-sized factoids supposed to be useful to people who want to read and appreciate literature?

Perhaps upon finishing this article, we as readers are expected to run to our nearest bookstore and purchase copies of the listed books, the way we would run to Bloomingdale's to buy an article of clothing recently featured in GQ or Vogue. At the very least, if we don't read these books, we can display them on our shelves. Books are very decorative. Or maybe we are supposed to email links to this list to all our friends, and then line up like lemmings in the digital chat room thoughtfully provided by the Times to alternatively applaud or lament the inclusion and exclusion of various novels from the winners' circle.

Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the worthiness of the books on the Times list because I don't believe works of art belong on top-ten lists or in popularity contests. What is the best work of American fiction of the last twenty-five years? The answer is: who knows? And more importantly, who cares?

Judging the overall quality of a book is a part of the reading experience, but only one part. Recently, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses at the top of a list of 100 "best" works of fiction in English from the twentieth-century. And yet I find myself going back again and again to books ranked much lower on this same list, for example Howards End. Perhaps of these two, Ulysses is the "better" more completely realized work of art. But Howards End is the book I'd take to a desert island.

When I pick up a novel, my chief concern is not how the work rates according to some illusionary gold standard of quality, how many points it can score in categories like "plot," "character" or "style." Rather, I hope that the work I'm reading will impact me in some way, will move me or entertain me, perhaps teach me about some corner of the universe or corner of my soul I didn't know existed.

In literature, there can be no winners or runners-up because art and our response to it is necessarily individual. This is not to say aesthetic standards don't exist, but rather that it is difficult, nearly impossible, to evaluate art without being tainted by personal or cultural bias. Critics trying to decide what belongs in the literary canon are a bit like physicists trying to create a unified field theory that describes the universe: we may be able to do the job, but only over several lifetimes. Therefore, there can be no definitive judgment of "best" or "worst," only a series of complex reflections, arguments and counter-arguments, messy dialogues without easy conclusions. It is a process that is not suited to lists, though it is suited to thoughtful criticism.

As I looked over the list of judges consulted by the New York Times, I saw so many names of people whose work I respect deeply, and I felt sorry to have missed the chance to hear more from them. I couldn't help wishing The Times had given each of these talented people a chance to elaborate on a book that had meaning for them and why, in the spirit of The Times's inspiring series of articles called “Writers on Writing.”

Or why not ask these writers to choose books from the past that have a special relevance to our time, or books that weren't celebrated when they were published and ought to have been?

Unfortunately, the options above all lack the glittering yet dangerous allure of "Best Of" lists, which project a powerful sense of Immediacy and importance, of wisdom set in stone like The Ten Commandments.

They play to our contemporary longing for the best and the brightest, the American drive to be, or at least be near, Number One. And yet the simplicity of lists is a lie. They close down discussion by handing out answers instead of opening it up by asking questions.

They ask us to live our aesthetic lives as a mad dash in which we read only the best books, see only the best films, plays, and art shows, eat only at the best restaurants, talk only to the best people, live only in an enchanted garden, where the weeds of life are yanked out by the roots so they don't get in our way.