Or possibly not that dark, since I've seen other bloggers write stuff that suggests some of you, too, suffer from the problem I'm about to reveal.
I regularly choose books for my classes that I haven't already read.
In fact, I regularly choose books for my classes that I haven't even seen.
Choosing books is a strange and difficult, yet exciting task. It's exciting because there's that opportunity to change things that didn't work last time you taught a class, or (especially if it's a new class), to think about new ways to bring texts together in fascinating and thought-provoking ways, to see what's been published since you last looked, and to ponder all the possibilities out there holding the promise that, if you choose correctly, you may actually yet design the perfect class.
But it's a difficult task, made so by three factors: the conditions of the job; the conditions of the profession; and the conditions of the institution in question.
The conditions of the institution: this might be put more simply as your audience, and includes what you might call the most material factors. How much money can you expect students to spend on books? How many pages can you expect them to read? It's no good assigning the latest specialized study from Oxford University Press if it's 600 pages long and costs $75. I feel pretty lucky in my current gig - the students here apparently don't care much about cost (by and large they're not paying themselves) - and I can get away with assigning quite a bit of reading - say 6-7 books between 150-300 pp or so each. (There are plenty of schools still where a history survey entails a textbook and that's it.) Also, at what level can you expect your students to read? That 600 pager is probably going to go straight over their heads because it's not written for them, it's written for bigwigs in the field. These are relatively straightforward things to consider, but they do complicate how you choose your books.
The conditions of the profession: my field (history) has been tending in the last 20 years or so (total random guess about time) toward narrower and narrower studies. Partly this is due to increased expectations for tenure (resulting from the abysmal job market, because even the smallest most teaching-oriented school is likely to hire someone with research experience and interests, meaning that the expectations for tenure go up), and the resulting near-necessity of publishing one's dissertation, which is not usually something of broad vision and scope (no disrespect to dissertations, they're just not usually like that). Beyond this, writing broad, synthetic overviews or other kinds of work most suitable for assigning in undergraduate courses is not valued in terms of tenure reviews or post-tenure reviews. Prestige tends to come from highly specialized research and engaging with other scholars in your subfield. Some scholars do manage to tackle important questions in studies based on rigorous individual research in such a fashion that undergraduate students will be able to read and learn from such books. But in general, the kind of work that gets you "ahead' in the historical profession is not always going to be appropriate to assign in an undergradute course. This means that even in really interesting and important areas of study, there can be volumes printed and nothing appropriate to assign to undergrads. (Case in point: I am teaching a class on women in Early Modern Europe next semester. I would really really really like to find a nice, accessible, relatively short book addressing the question of women and witchcraft in Europe as a whole. But the only accessible, short works I'm aware of are so popularized that they're just not very good history. There has certainly been TONS of writing on witches/the witch craze. But when you combine the direction of historical publishing with the audience for the work, the stuff I've found is either a) too specialized b) too long or c) too expensive for me to assign in an undergraduate survey.)
Finally, the conditions of the job: this is embarrassing to admit, given that I am a college professor and all, but I feel like I NEVER have time to read anything I don't absolutely, positively, HAVE to read. In fact, reading books at all has become weird and complicated since graduating from college. One of grad school's most important lessons, it seemed to me (and I think The Cranky Professor says something like this on his homepage), was to learn how to get the information you needed out of a book without actually reading the whole thing. I had grad school friends and peers who found this whole approach very disconcerting ("we went to grad school because we like reading books!") but I took to it like a ginger cat to black trousers. I became excellent at gutting a book - read the intro, read the conclusion, look at the table of contents, skim the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, look for pertinent headings or tables or charts, hey presto, you're done. This skill was the only thing that got me through my prelims, and I was damn good at it.
But then I started teaching full time. And you can't gut a book when you're teaching it, because invariably whatever section you felt didn't need a close reading is the section about which some kind soul in class will put their hand up and say, "I didn't really get what they meant about the fish?" And you're standing there in front of everyone, frantically thinking, the fish, the fish, what on earth did the book say about fish? And most of the time the student really hasn't understood and it's not really about fish, it's actually about bicycles, but if you didn't read the section to begin with you're not in a very good position to explain that. And there's the temptation to stand there and say, "Oh, the fish, yes, well, that's not really relevant to what we're studying in this class, so I wouldn't worry about it," but then one of the savvier students will stick their hand up and say, "But what about the bicycles?"
At which point you say, "So, about your midterm next week..."
Anyway, the point I really mean to make here is that I don't find it possible to gut-read the books I assign for class. I have to read the whole thing, carefully, unless I've already taught it four or five times (which is still relatively rare for me). And sadly, since I have a brain that seems very good at dumping unnecessary information at the end of the semester (unnecessary = anything I don't need to know for the following semester), if I teach a class every other year, even when I re-assign the same book, I have to read it again because I don't remember a word of what it said.
(I guess this is where better class plans etc. come in. But that's another post.)
So, what with teaching three classes a semester (and I know that load could be oh-so-much worse), and grading all those pedagogically sound assignments I give, my reading is limited to books assigned for class, and whatever I need to read for whatever research I have going on at that point. (Brief digression: when I was in grad school I didn't understand how people found it hard to keep up on the reading in their field; I was much more concerned with pulling together enough archival/primary source material to support any remotely interesting or original research. Now I've been to the archives enough to have plenty of that material lying around, but keeping up with current publishing suddenly seems much more difficult. How dare anyone write anything on my subject since I finished my dissertation! And now that I can't gut-read books that I teach, I've really fallen out of the habit in general, and tend to read EVERYTHING with as much attention as if I were going to teach it...which is very sloooooowly.)
So when it comes time to choose new books for a class, I rarely have time actually to read them. I've worked out a calculus for choosing books without reading them: I check out length. I check out tables of contents (assuming they're on Amazon). I look for reviews. And I google "book title" + "syllabus" to see if anyone else out there is using the book too. If I have time, I order exam copies or ILL books, but usually that just means I can look at the physical presentation of the book and read the TOC more easily than on Amazon - it doesn't usually mean read any more of it than I would otherwise.
Result: I regularly assign books I haven't read. Sometimes those books succeed, sometimes they fail miserably. So far it's never really resulted in disaster - so there's one book in the semester that everyone hates; oh, well; we have spend one day having a bitch session and figuring out what's wrong with it; we move on. I can live with it.
But it does leave me wondering what it would be like to teach a class in which I knew the contents of ALL the readings before I started teaching it!
