Andorra - The Phaeton Report - Albert Salvado

Why I picked Andorra: I was potting around on the blog page, I thinking about focusing on ticking off all of Europe. Andorra was first on the list of European countries that needed a book to be found, so i just did some googling. The Phaeton Report popped up straight away any the reviews where very intriuiging, as they all seemed to talk about how unusual the story is, and also how it breaks the rules of story telling. The piqued my interest enough to get a copy. unfortunate, this book wasn't available through my local book store, and I had to use Amazon to get an English copy. It looks like it is only available through Amazon as a print on demand book. My Spanish isn't good enough to delve deeper in the original publication, but i'm just happy to get a copy in English. I'll probably put some more research into the author and history of the book as i'm about 50 pages from finishing the book at the moment and loving it!

The Physical Book: Its very much a basic run of the mill book, cover artwork is pretty bad and uninspiring. paper quality is basic. 

The Story: Its not really a story, well it kind of follows the main character and his discovery of a underground organisation that has discovered the truth of mankind's true history. The book then goes through the retelling of these truths to our protagonist who is given the job of collating and writing these discoveries into a new book. So the readers discover the 'facts' at the same time as the lead character. So the story is pretty bland. But the ideas and discoveries told to the writer, are quite incredible. These discoveries re-tell and re-interpret stories from ancient text such as the Bible, The book of Enoch, and other ancient artefacts. So I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, and have a pretty good knowledge of the Bible, but I left the Church when I was 16, as I didn't really believe a lot of it, and with Jehovah's Witnesses its fairly binary. You are either in or out, there is no toe dipping, no 'non-nonpracticing' JWs. So I was out. I still hold onto a lot of the information I learnt, but don't stand with the morals or the belief that any Gods exist. So this book REALLY appealed to me. The author is incredibly well read and researched. There were just enough nuggets of truth and moments of 'Yeah, I remember that from the Bible", and "I think that was covered in my geography lessons at school" and then puts a fresh spin on what you thought you knew. There are a couple of chapters i'm going to go back and reread as they were just so fascinating. The ones about Adam and Eve, and the Fallen Angels especially stood out to me and i really want to revisit them.

The book has also inspired me to read the Book of Enoch, which I didn't know much about, but sounds weirder than the Bible, and that's probably why its only consider canon by a handful of religions.

Andorran? Nope, it mentions Andorra a couple of times, but other than that it doesn't touch on Andorra's culture or history. But as per so many other books, this project has unearthed a brilliant read