It’s the second day of the week! It’s also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesdays was initially created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm, but is now being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

This week’s topic: Top 5 books I will definitely* read in 2026

For this Top Five Tuesday, I am featuring works listed in the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die that I plan to read this year. They are either part of my Beat the Backlist Challenge or my 2026 Top 26 Reading List.

Title: The Ogre
Author: Michel Tournier
Translator (from French): Barbara Bray
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1972
No. of Pages: 370

Synopsis: 

An international bestseller, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. Following strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges’s passage from submissive schoolboy to “ogre” of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, it takes us deeper into the dark heart of fascism that any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all, holds us spellbound.

Title: Z
Author: Vassilis Vassilikos
Translator (From Greek): Marilyn Calmann
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: January 2017 (1966)
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: 

A progressive parliamentary deputy is scheduled to appear at a political rally. Meanwhile, local political bosses plot his assassination. Thugs are recruited to disrupt the rally. Rumors begin to spread. But the forces already set in motion are irresistible. Z is the story of a crime, a time, a place, and people transformed by events.

Z was published in Greece in 1966, and banned there one year later. It is based on an actual political assassination in 1963 in Salonika. The victim was Gregory Lambrakis, a socialist legislator and outspoken critic of the government. But Lamrakis’s killers could not have anticipated the public response. His funeral became a political event; by the time the cortege reaches Athens, 400,000 people were following the coffin in silence. In the nation’s capital, the letter Z suddenly appeared on walls, sidewalks, posters – everywhere. Z stands for the Greek verb zei, “he lives.”

Title: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1986
No. of Pages: 208

Synopsis: 

The rich and spoiled children of Los Angeles have it all – sex, drugs, fast cars, air-conditioned mansions. Theirs is a world shaped by television, rock music, and too much money; it is a world devoid of feeling and of hope.

In a startling, staccato style reminiscent of music videos, Bret Easton Ellis re-creates this world in a dizzying journey through endless parties, seedy rock clubs, and the seamy underworld of drug dealing and prostitution. Haunting, unnerving, Less Than Zero is the inside story of a generation on a desperate search for the ultimate sensation.

Title: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Gollancz
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 297

Synopsis: 

William Gibson revolutionised science fiction in his 1984 debut Neuromancer. The writer who gave us the matrix and coined the term ‘cyberspace’ produced a first novel that won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and lit the fuse on the Cyberpunk movement.

More than three decades later, Gibson’s text is as stylish as ever, his noir narrative still glitters like chrome in the shadows and his depictions of the rise and abuse of corporate power look more prescient every day. Part thriller, part warning, Neuromancer is a timeless classic of modern SF and one of the 20th century’s most potent and compelling visions of the future.

Title: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2008 (1818)
No. of Pages: 249

Synopsis: 

Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. With humour, insight and tenderness, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society.