Battle Of The Books is a club that has been around for many years. Their time together slowly comes to an end as they begin to prepare for their final battle of the year. Adviser Sarah Gumtow has had a great time being able to run this club and see the students read books and work together.

“When I started here, they had done Battle of The Books for one year, so it was already a club that had been started. I just stepped right into the role,” Gumtow said.

Gumtow is also the Co-head of the Senior Committee for the state. She gets to help pick out the lists of 20 books that the participants throughout Wisconsin will read. To begin the process of picking the books, Gumtow starts by making spreadsheets of all the award-winning books that are coming out. By the time no more books are announced, she has about 300 book titles on her spreadsheets. 

“The committee tries to read as many books from the lists as we can. Then, we try to choose a variety of different genres and books that represent a variety of kinds of characters to make a list of 20 books,” Gumtow said.

Not only does the committee pick books but they ask their advisers and students from around Wisconsin to help suggest books to read. Sophomore Elizabeth Kutzleb is one of the four members in the Battle of The Books. She says she enjoys being able to read and work with their team.

“My love for reading, being able to read different genres of books I normally wouldn’t, and just having fun while reading,” Kutzleb said.

Out of the list of 20 books, Kutzleb decided to read “Dragonfruit” by Makiia Lucier, “Wild Dreamers” by Margarita Engle, “Break to You” by Neal Shusterman, and “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” by Suzanne Collins. The rest of her teammates divided up the other 15 books. 

“Since there are four of us we each just read five,” Kutzleb said. 

The team works together on their competitions which is why they are able to split up the work.

“Our team of four students will actually work together on the final battle so they can divide the book lists up. It is neat to see them try to figure out the answer for each question,” Gumtow said.

During the team’s meetings, members take the time to prepare for the battles against other schools.

“It’s a statewide battle, so we compete, but the competition is actually virtual. There are usually about 60 other schools in Wisconsin at the high school level that compete,” Gumtow said.

Meetings are important to students because it’s where they are able to discuss what they are reading with the rest of the group and study what is needed for them to score well on the final battle, which took place the last week of February. 

“We discuss and go over our quizzes or we start quizzing each other on book titles and authors,” Kutzleb said.

Knowing authors and book titles are the most important parts of the quizzes.  This is what determines the points they earn to help their team. 

“Students, for each answer, have to give a title and an author. Students get ten points for each correct title and five points for every correct author,” Gumtow said.   

Since each team member is responsible for reading different books it’s important they get their reading done. This allows the school to move on and get the chance to win. The top three places in the Battle of The Books receive plaques to honor their hard work.

“Reading a list of 20 books and taking the test which has challenging questions does not sound like a lot of fun but it really is; it really can be a blast with the students. It’s great as an adviser to see students pushing themselves to read books that they maybe normally wouldn’t read. Then just talking about them and enjoying the company of other readers,”Gumtow said.