Started more than 50 years ago by Maxine Jackson, a librarian in HISD, Name That Book was originally hosted by the district and organized by librarians in the Library Services Department.

Name That Book is a club that encourages its members to read award-winning books and participate in a district-wide competition in the spring.

“It’s just a trivia competition,” Name That Book sponsor and Algebra teacher Margaret Jernigan said. “You read the books, and then you hear a quote from the book, and you have to guess which of the 25 books on the list that quote came from.”

The Library Services Department was discontinued in March, which meant schools would need to independently organize the Name That Book contest.

Without district librarians to oversee the Name That Book competitions for elementary, middle and high schoolers, club members didn’t know whether Name That Book would be able to continue this year.

“[The dismissal of Library Services] put [all of Name That Book] up in the air because [HISD] is the one that creates the competition, the one that picks the quotes, the one that chooses the books in the first place,” Jernigan said. “So if we wanted to do it, we needed to do it as a grassroots thing. All the high schools who wanted to participate would have to agree that we were going to put it on in the spring and then also agree on a book list, which was where I initially was like, ‘this is going to be a challenge.’”

Junior and co-president of Name That Book, Richard Manne is disappointed about the district change.

“I’m not too knowledgeable on how things have worked or are working at the district level, but the fact they’ve dropped such a key part in school districts nationwide worries me,” Manne said.

However, librarian Kaitlyn Carpenter and her background in collection development was ready. With knowledge from three previous years of helping out Name That Book, Carpenter knew that many of the books on the contest lists come from the TAYSHAS list.

“TAYSHAS is one of our state award-winning lists that is done by the Texas Library Association. They have committees of 25 plus librarians that read over 150 to 200 books a year, then vote and put out a list [of books] every January,” Carpenter said.

To create the booklist, she used a database called Teaching Books and built a collection analysis looking at genres, cultural experiences, awards, page count and Lexile levels. After that, she assembled a Google spreadsheet to categorize the wide variety of books.

“I wanted to have better and more diverse cultural experiences to promote positive things that I want my kids to read, but also give them a wide variety so that if they had to read every book on the list it would not be so redundant, repetitive and confusing,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter has since sent out the book list to other high schools in HISD, offering them a chance to participate. So far, four out of about nine schools with active high school libraries have registered. In past years, eight to 10 schools usually participated at the high school level.

Once other schools sign up and their libraries approve the book list, it is up to Carpenter and other participating librarians to decide whether the competition at the end of the year will be in-person or virtual. Carpenter is team virtual.

“This is the new normal, before trying to do it in person,” Carpenter said. “I foresee a lot of issues with transportation and them allowing [club members] to go off campus, even though it’s a district competition. So let’s just do it virtually this year and figure out logistics for in-person next year.”

Now that a book list has been created, Name That Book has begun its divide and conquer method: each participant reads four to five books, making sure each book is read at least once. Then, members attend quote practice meetings until the competition.

“During these quote practices, random quotes from random areas in the book are picked and chosen. They’re all compiled into a presentation and each quote is brought up on the screen, and we as a club have to come together,” Manne said. “Using the context clues of the quote and some prior knowledge of having read the books, [we] come to a conclusion about which book this actually comes from.”
As of now, a date for the event has not been set.

“My favorite thing about Name That Book is getting to read books that I normally wouldn’t,” Manne said. “It can be really interesting.”