Think on your feet for our Fast and Curious 5K, a one-of-a-kind race hosted by W.B.E.Z and the Chicago Sun Times on Saturday, July 27th at Humboldt Park.

More info and Early Bird registration at W beez.org

slash events.

From W.B.E. Z. Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson,

and this is the Nerd at Book Club. It's just like a regular book club except sometimes the author stops by.

It is April and our selection this month is Marie Helene Bertino's gorgeous and entrancing novel Beauty Land. It's about Edina, born in

Philadelphia at the same moment in 1977 that the Voyager 1 spacecraft leaves Earth.

When she is a young girl she realizes she's actually an alien

disguised as a person and her task is to send reports back to her home planet

about humanity via fax machine. That is all I want to say for now since we're going to do our best to keep this a spoiler-free conversation.

Marie, welcome to Nurdab.

It's so nice to be here, thank you, Greta.

So you were born in 77, right?

I was. In Northeast Philadelphia, like our heroin. Do you remember the point at which

you first learned about Voyager? I think it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago when I discovered that they had sent a golden record into

space and it immediately captured my imagination. Yeah I mean that golden record, it's magical, it's magical. It really is the idea that we can put a collection of sounds and images and music like Chuck Berry onto a little time capsule and send it into space with the hope that

extraterrestrial life will will listen to it and know something about us.

It's so precious and adorable and potentially doomed

and never going to work, but the hope is there and that's all that matters. It is funny I feel like there is a real like I mean there's an earnest

naivete to it there's also a real like optimal like we let's not talk about any of the horrible

things we do let's just talk about the fun nice stuff yeah you know in

researching beauty lands I came to discover that there has been critique of that golden record of not

...