Books : The Rat Series from Murakami

It's been days since I started to think about which new book to read, after Jay Rubin's book. I wanted to read something that is not too thick and heavy ( both 'Hard-boiled Wonderland & the End of the World' and 'Ghostwritten' are quite heavy - it will take weeks to finish ). 

So I remembered the zipped folder a friend of mine sent to me early this year. It consisted of Murakami's e-books in .epub & .mobi formats, that can be read using ibook. I don't know what makes me think about it again early yesterday morning. I love physical books and I found reading on devices a nuisance, so I ignored those files all this time. 

But I decided to check it out again and I found precious 'Hear the Wind Sings (1979)' and 'Pinball ,1973 (1980)' in the folder. These 2 books aren't widely published in English, so you won't find it anywhere in the local bookstores. But the files were there in my Mac all this time! :F 

Both books are the earliest books that Murakami wrote when he was still a jazz-bar owner and not a full-time writer. I finished reading it this morning and will start the second one on Tuesday morning. The first book is mostly raw writing fiction, straight-forward Murakami's style, but even so, with a great deal of small random descriptions on his surrounding, which I like the most.

It's the first and second book before "A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)" & "Dance, Dance, Dance (1988) ", from the "Rat series". I found out about these books being a series before I started reading the third book, "A Wild Sheep Chase", when I read Jay Rubin's explanation about the Western publisher that didn't care to publish these series in a chronological order, so such thing like telling us it's a trilogy was simply ignored. But thankfully they still can do well as a stand-alone novel.

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