Self-loathing, insecurity, validation -- these are the murky secrets behind the relationship between critics and readers. It's a dysfunctional relationship if there ever was one, and both sides are at fault. You, whose identity is formed out of allegiances to certain TV series. Me, whose scathing indictment of one of your favorite TV series sends you immediately to the mail with a withering attack on my (fill in the blank) inability to enjoy life/elitism/parentage, upon the receipt of which I fall into a bottomless funk because one reader out there doesn't love me and I am worthless.

Clearly, the bond between critic and reader is a lot more complicated than we'd like to think. And so is the bond between critic and art. There's more to criticism than thumb semaphores and one-paragraph report cards and interchangeable Hollywood-blockbuster ad blurbs ("The thrill ride of the summer!") but, sadly, you wouldn't know it from the ever-shrinking space afforded critical headroom in the media. At its best, criticism is an informed opinion delivered with wit and strength. It's an inspired riff on an inspiring subject. It's a declaration of passion and an impassioned debate. Most people think that art and criticism exist in a kind of mortal combat, when it's really a loving embrace.

For our first "Personal Best," 14 Salon staffers and contributors (including one guy who got in because he was having lunch with a couple of editors and, well, you know how it is) engage in close encounters of the critical kind with their favorite album of all time (at least for this week). As you'll see, these are often not obvious or even rational choices. And the lineup isn't inclusive, nor is it meant to be. But there is a wide and diverse expanse of pop music represented here, as befits a group of writers ranging in age from 26 to 50. There are Sinatra and the Stones, Prince and Elvis Costello, Liz Phair and Jimi Hendrix, the Clash and the Roches, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Moon Mullican and Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, the Vulgar Boatmen and the Beatles. What these essays have in common is this: They're all steeped in time and memory, most of them reveal as much (maybe more) about the writer as they do about the album. They are all testament to the chemical change that happens when music and listener, art and critic, meet.

Any name-your-favorite-album exercise must pay, upfront, its debt to Greil Marcus' "Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island," arguably the greatest and most fun anthology of rock criticism of all time. First published in 1979, "Stranded" has recently been reissued by Da Capo in paperback with a new preface by Marcus and a new foreword by Village Voice chief music critic Robert Christgau.

"Stranded" is a collection of 20 essays on the topic, "What album would you want to have with you if you were shipwrecked on a desert isle?," by the creme de la creme of '70s rock critics (including Christgau, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ellen Willis, Ariel Swartley and Kit Rachlis). Marcus' "Treasure Island" epilogue, an annotated list of rock 'n' roll must-haves, is alone worth the price of admission.

A few of the choices may look dated and strange now (why on Earth would anyone want to listen to the Eagles' "Desperado" for all eternity?), but every one of these writers justifies their love, in some of the most rollicking, contentious, heartfelt and plain gorgeous prose you'll ever read. This is the book that launched a thousand rock-critic-career dreams. Oh, to be someday included in this company, in this community of cool misfits who couldn't simply enjoy an album, they had to internalize it, ponder it, prod it, poke it, romanticize it, argue about it with each other over a beer and with the artist (one-way, in print, for very little money) over the years. Surely, this must be heaven, or at the very least, home.

In his foreword to the new edition, Christgau laments the loss of community brought by the fragmentation of rock -- and its fans -- into separate walled-off domains. But, oddly, it's the allegedly crankiest and most negative members of that lost community who have emerged with their vision and optimism intact. The music scene -- and the world at large -- may feel "too much like chaos," writes Christgau, but "at least...it's still a world where writers can strive not only to make sense, but to find deep human possibility in the music that lifts us over and gets us through."