What is Steve Toutonghi reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Steve Toutonghi, author of Join.

His entry begins:

I'm in the very last few pages of Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman. It's the story of an African American family who agree to participate in a study in which they'll be observed raising a chimpanzee as a member of the family. Greenidge's exploration of the dynamics within the family, between the family and the staff of the institute sponsoring the study, and between the family and town they move to is deft and often understated, but there are also loud blasts when she decides to set off some of the landmines in the terrain she's mapping. It's a fascinating book, filled with well rendered, complex interactions that expose both necessary and dangerous currents flowing between family and culture. My favorite passages so far have been...[read on]

About Join, from the publisher:

What if you could live multiple lives simultaneously, have constant, perfect companionship, and never die? That’s the promise of Join, a revolutionary technology that allows small groups of minds to unite, forming a single consciousness that experiences the world through multiple bodies. But as two best friends discover, the light of that miracle may be blinding the world to its horrors.

Chance and Leap are jolted out of their professional routines by a terrifying stranger—a remorseless killer who freely manipulates the networks that regulate life in the post-Join world. Their quest for answers—and survival—brings them from the networks and spire communities they’ve known to the scarred heart of an environmentally ravaged North American continent and an underground community of the “ferals” left behind by the rush of technology.

In the storytelling tradition of classic speculative fiction from writers like David Mitchell and Michael Chabon, Join offers a pulse-pounding story that poses the largest possible questions: How long can human life be sustained on our planet in the face of environmental catastrophe? What does it mean to be human, and what happens when humanity takes the next step in its evolution? If the individual mind becomes obsolete, what have we lost and gained, and what is still worth fighting for?

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Learn about Steve Toutonghi's six top books that expand our mental horizons.

Writers Read: Steve Toutonghi.

--Marshal Zeringue