I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat Book Club.

It's just like a regular book club, except way more fun. This month's book is Maggie Shippstead's Great Circle, which is by far one of my favorite books I've read this year. It's a novel about Marion Graves, a pilot who disappears in Antarctica in 1950 while trying to fly around the world from pole to pole.

And it's about Hadley Baxter, the jaded young actor who's asked to play Marion in a biopic based on her life.

This is the most efficiently I can describe it.

Obviously, I mean, you know, this is like an almost 600-page book.

There is so much more to it than that, which means I am very excited to unpack it with two astute readers and writers. With us this week are Bethann

Patrick, who tweets as the book Maven and writes reviews for the Washington Post and a great many

other places. Beth Ann, hello. Hello, Greta. So delighted to be here. Welcome back. Thank you.

Glad to be back. I think this is going to be a really fun one. We also have with us today, Lori Muchnick, the fiction editor for Kirkus reviews. Lori, hello.

Great, Greta, hi, Beth Ann. Thank you so much for coming. I'm really excited to talk about this book with both of you. So here's your spoiler warning. If you haven't read Great Circle yet and you don't want spoilers,

this is not the podcast episode for you. We have a spoiler-free episode in the feed with Maggie

Shipstead, the author of Great Circle. So go check that out instead. If you haven't read Great Circle,

but you love spoilers, welcome. We're glad to have you. I think we should start with,

I don't know, this is very obvious, but let's start with the beginning. And maybe mostly about

Marion, though we can kind of see how much, I don't know, it's like Maggie goes back and forth.

We can go back and forth too, right? But I'm really curious to hear from both of you what you thought

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