The travel destinations of My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights in August 2015 were Scotland, the USSR, the USA, and Sweden. Two of my reads were classics, though very different ones. While the historical English novel The Galliard by Margaret Irwin retells the legendary love story between Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, powerfully evokes the daily fight for survival in Stalin’s GULAGs in Siberia. The contemporary reads on my tour brought me closer to the Arctic Circle. The American novel And She Was by Cindy Dyson reveals the cruel history of the Native Aleut population on the islands off the Alaskan coast after their discovery in 1741 and in Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell a retired surgeon is forced to face his past.