I came across A Woman in the Polar Night at @bridgestbooks exactly a year ago, and it was the perfect book to read in these last days of the winter season. It’s a beautifully written account of Ritter’s year living on the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian arctic, where she joins her hunter/trapper husband in the early 1930s. It’s rare to read a woman’s perspective of life in the Arctic, and Ritter’s is especially striking as she talks about the landscape and how she comes to recognize, and love, the beauty of it all, even amidst the struggles to survive. Much of their food intake relies on hunting, and so that is a major part of the book, and there are passages describing the trapping of arctic foxes for their fur, but thankfully not in too much detail. I found the entire book riveting.