- Performance: Trevor Lund reads it himself, and the publisher field carries the same name as the author and narrator fields.
- What it covers: A ten-year dream finally acted on, solo endurance, the world of 1999 before mobile phones, bears and bandits and broken spokes.
- Feel: Plainspoken and confiding, nearer to a long letter home than to a produced travel book.
- Our call: Rough at the edges and completely genuine, and the self-narration is the reason it holds together.
Trevor Lund is the author of this audiobook. He is also its narrator. He is also, according to the publisher field, its publisher. Three roles, one name, fifteen hours and forty-seven minutes. Whatever else this record turns out to be, it is a wholly self-made object, and that single fact colors everything else on the page.
In 1999, as a mature student with a year to spare, Lund set out to ride from the southern tip of South America to the Arctic Ocean. He carried no mobile phone. That was a decision rather than a limitation, and the description is careful to say so: getting lost, getting injured or getting into trouble would be his own problem to sort out. A travel companion found through the fledgling internet lasted nine days. After that he was alone, close to the bottom of the world, with several thousand miles of unknown still in front of him.
Johan Horak's five-star entry is not written to you. It is addressed to Trevor, in the second person, thanking him for sharing misery, happiness, frustration and honesty, and saying that this kind of honesty is missing from other cycle logs. It then mentions a stomach problem on an uphill stretch with nowhere to deal with it. That is what self-published adventure writing earns when it works: not a review but a reply, from somebody who felt spoken to rather than sold to. The spelling wanders and the punctuation gives up halfway, and neither costs the entry anything, because the warmth in it is not the kind of thing an editor supplies.
Mr. R., holding the only grade under five, has an entirely different relationship with the book. That entry wants the loaded weight of the bike with the water containers full, observes that it never appears, and suspects it must have been very heavy. It then registers the breakdowns as excessive, listing panniers, tires, rims and spokes as failing far too often for comfort. The verdict still lands on endurance and on completing one's goals. It is a reader reviewing an expedition rather than a memoir, and it is oddly endearing.
Why Listen to North to Alaska
Fifteen hours and forty-seven minutes is a great deal of one voice, and the argument for it here is stronger than usual. The description is already written in the first person, so this recording is not an interpretation of Lund's account but a continuation of it. A hired reader would have to perform a working-class family in Leeds, a job nobody enjoyed and a year of solitude from the outside. The author has to perform none of it. What you give up is the polish a trained professional brings, and the record offers no way of judging how much that costs.
Amazon Customer supplies the strangest sentence in the whole column. Having praised the genuineness, the vulnerability and the eye for detail that makes you appreciate every turn of the wheel, that reviewer adds a parenthesis: a Kindle lets you read in the tent without adding much weight to the ride. It is a perfectly fair point about a printed book. It is a very peculiar sentence to encounter beneath a recording that weighs nothing whatever and can be played while the bike is still moving.
Singing to bears to keep them at bay is in this book. So is running out of water crossing the driest desert in the world, a volcano raining ash down, and hiding from bandits most nights while pedaling through Mexico. The description delivers all of that in one breathless sentence, and those are the set pieces that sell it. The reviews confirm that the connective material holds up too: illness, injury, exhaustion, loneliness, and the unloved job back home that started the whole thing off a decade earlier.
What to Watch For in North to Alaska
A self-published memoir carries a specific risk, and Mr. R. gestures at it without quite naming it: nobody stopped this author to ask what a reader needs. The weight goes unstated. The mechanical failures pile up with no editor asking whether the fifth one earns its place. Over fifteen hours those omissions compound, because a listener cannot skim past a passage the way an eye can. Train guy's five-star entry reports being left wanting more, which is generous, and Mr. R. reports something close to the opposite about the mechanical stretches.
Self-published, self-narrated and self-issued is not an accusation, but it does mean nothing on this record has been checked by a third party. No production company vetted the audio. No house edited the prose. No publicist wrote the description, which is exactly why it reads like a person talking instead of a marketing document, and that is genuinely part of the appeal. It also means the usual reassurances are absent, and you are extending trust on every axis at once.
Nobody should read the number at the top of this listing as a verdict. The badge shows 4.6 while the tally beneath it claims a single vote, which is not an outcome whole stars have any way of producing. Five graded responses sit in plain view: one at four, the rest at the maximum. The tally therefore falls short of its own visible evidence by a factor of five. Read the written entries instead, because they are the only part of this record with anything in them, and treat the figure above them as decoration bolted to the wrong denominator.
Who Should Listen to North to Alaska
Cyclists who have ever looked at a map and wondered will want this, and touring riders in particular will find the practical texture they usually have to dig for. Adventure memoir readers who want a narrator with no persona to maintain, an ordinary person who took a year out and simply went, get precisely that. Set it aside when you want a professionally produced recording with a trained reader, because this is not that and never claims to be. Set it aside too if unstated logistics are going to nag at you, since one reviewer here has already done the nagging on your behalf.
The book owns one thing money cannot buy a publisher, which is the person who actually did it, still audible in the sentences. Lund reads the whole thing himself: for an account this personal, that was probably the only honest option available.
Common Questions
Who reads the North to Alaska audiobook?
Trevor Lund reads it himself. The record puts the identical name into the author, narrator and publisher fields, which makes this a self-made release from end to end. Since the blurb speaks in Lund's own voice from its opening word, the recording extends that voice instead of interpreting it, and no other performer is credited anywhere.
When did the ride happen, and how far did it go?
The description dates the departure to 1999, when Lund was a mature student who took a year out of his studies. The route runs from the southern tip of South America up to the Arctic Ocean, and a companion found through the early internet lasted nine days before he went on alone with no phone.
What is the one criticism in the reviews?
Equipment, oddly enough. The single grade below five wants the loaded weight of the bike stated somewhere and never finds it, and considers the failures in panniers, tires, rims and spokes far too frequent to be comfortable. That same entry still calls the result a great story about endurance and about finishing what you start.
Does the 4.6 rating on this audiobook mean anything?
Very little. A whole-star system has no route from one logged vote to 4.6, so the pairing is impossible before you even reach the column. Meanwhile five graded responses are sitting right there in the open, and only one of them falls below the maximum. Read that handful and disregard the figure printed above it.
