Mission Impossible

Mission Impossible at Evanston Public Library is a community-driven reading challenge where we tackle some of the most challenging books ever written. Designed to encourage readers to step out of their comfort zones, this program fosters a love for literature, promotes critical thinking, and creates a shared experience around thought-provoking, often complex texts.

 

The 2025-2026 author is Thomas Mann.  The writings that we will read and discuss include:

  • "Tonio Kröger" and "Death in Venice" from Death in Venice and Other Tales, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
  • "Mario and the Magician," translated by H.T. Porter
  • The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods

Discussion Groups

Reading Schedule

Discussion Prompts

Extra Resources

Find Your Discussion Group

  • In-Person & Virtual
coming soon

Reading Schedules for...

  • Monthly Group
    - coming soon

  • Every Other Month Group
    - coming soon

  • Three Meetings Group - coming soon

Discussion Prompts for...

Monthly Group
  • coming soon
Every Other Month Group
  • coming soon
Three Meetings Group
  • coming soon

Find information about...

  • Thomas Mann
  • Literary Themes
  • Historical Context

coming soon

These are the books that we have read over the years:

  • 2025-2026 - Death in Venice and Other Tales and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  • 2024-2025 - The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  • 2023-2024 - Midnight's Children & The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
  • 2022-2023 - The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, & Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
  • 2021-2022 - No One Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, & Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
  • 2020-2021 - Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, & Orlando by Virginia Woolf
  • 2019-2020 - Go Tell It On The Mountain, Giovanni's Room, & Another Country by James Baldwin
  • 2018-2019 - As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, & Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  • 2017-2018 - The Brothers Karamazov & Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • 2016-2017 - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  • 2015-2016 - Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • 2014-2015 - Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • 2013-2014 - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
  • 2012-2013 - The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
  • 2011-2012 - War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • 2010-2011 - Ulysses by James Joyce
Back to Top