These bloggers at HawaiiReaders.com have an insider's perspective on the local literary scene, so we asked them to recommend a book for holiday giving.

CHRIS MCKINNEY

“An Offering of Rice”
By Mavis Hara
Bamboo Ridge Press
I’ve always had a problem with the abundance of nostalgia in local literature. Because we live in such a beautiful place, it’s so tempting to write about Hawaiçi when it was even more lovely — less people, more fish. We witness nostalgia in songs, books, and hear it from our elders all the time. In Hawaiçi, it’s part of the culture.
The cover of Mavis Hara’s “An Offering of Rice” doesn’t have people on it, just a painting of big leaves and flowers. So when I picked it up, I was thinking, oh dear, here we go again.
However, once I read it, it became clear that this is a character-driven collection of poetry and prose, and anything nostalgic is incidental (and sometimes enjoyable — Tomoe Ame candy? Completely forgot that stuff existed). In one poem, a girl watches an octopus cling to life, and a colander, in a refrigerator. She cries. In “Chemotherapy,” a woman battles cancer. She doesn’t cry.
Mavis Hara’s book is a perfect example of how character should be the focus of story, not the number of päpio you could catch in Käneçohe Bay 30 years ago. Once nostalgia takes over, and character gets lost in the midst of back-in-the-day revelry … I have no interest in reading it.
“An Offering of Rice” is a terrific book by a talented writer. It will make a fine gift.
Chris McKinney is the author of “The Tattoo,” “The Queen of Tears,” “Bolohead Row” and “Mililani Mauka.” His blog “Storyland” is a peek into his fertile imagination.

ROGER JELLINEK

“Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Through The Year — Two Centuries of Writing”
Edited by Gavan Daws and Bennett Hymer
Mutual Publishing
It can’t be said of many books that every Honolulu home should have one, but “Honolulu Stories” is such a book. It’s certainly one of the best possible holiday gifts. The thousand-plus pages of writing about Honolulu, edited by Gavan Daws and Bennett Hymer and published last year, includes every kind of storytelling, and makes the perfect bedside book. It was awarded the Samuel M. Kamakau Award for the 2009 Hawaii Book of the Year, and received an award of excellence in literature. Its 32-page historical introduction is indispensable, and is in itself worth the price of admission.
Mutual Publishing posted this eloquent description on its Web site: “Hawaiçi has never seen a book like this — hundreds of the voices of Honolulu, alive on the page, telling the story of the town over the years, from tiny village to raucous whaling port to capitol of the Hawaiian kingdom to 21st-century multicultural metropolis, flanked by Waikïkï on one side and Pearl Harbor on the other.”
Roger Jellinek, a literary agent, has been an editor and publisher in New York and Hawaiçi for 45 years. He is Executive Director of the Hawaii Book and Music Festival.

THOMAS CUMMINGS

“Talking Hawaiçi’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island people”
Michi Kodama-Nishimoto, Warren S. Nishimoto, and Cynthia A. Oshiro
UH Press
Here’s my take on the book “Talking Hawaiçi’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People,” a must-read book for its wealth of talk-story reminisces by local folks. Great as a Christmas gift.
It’s a given that Queen Liliçuokalani looms large in Hawaiçi’s history. But in “The Rascal of Waikiki” by Lemon “Rusty” Holt we learn of her down-to-island style when she visited Rusty’s mom in Waikïkï, early 1900s — how she loved to eat coconut meat, soft enough to spoon out — from trees at Rusty’s family place, trees he climbed to fetch the nut then husk for her. Or the manini fish, caught by Rusty, with his shorts as the trap, off Waikïkï beach, for the deposed queen to eat raw.
Rusty also tells how he alone, of all the jealous neighborhood kids, regularly surfed tandem with powerfully built Prince Kühiö, on that aliçi’s long and heavy redwood board, which was tied under the pier when not in use — and nobody touched it. A telling like that makes Kühiö just a common neighbor, this same Prince Cupid, whose great-grandfather was Kaumualiçi, the king of Kauaçi during the Kamehameha the Great era. Kühiö, the Territory of Hawaiçi representative in Congress in the 1920s, was jailed as a young man as the Royalist leader of the attempted armed take-back of the Hawaiian Kingdom, illegally wrested from his aunt, Liliçuokalani.
(Rusty included the “Stonewall Gang” photo of 37 bare-chested men, in trousers, standing on Waikïkï Beach. In front of them are six boys kneeling — one of them my father. Whew, chicken-skin.)
And that’s just one article. There’s more — a chop-suey mix of 29 topics about rascals, and heroes, and those in between. Tellings of routine life, “back then”: at work, at home, at play, in school and church, with friends and family. In the voices of Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean and others. Surely, there are good-fun stories in the book that’ll connect to you personally, where you can add your own remembrances as I’ve done.
Thomas C. Cummings Jr. has been a classroom teacher of Hawaiiana and a storyteller for 50 years. His “Hawaiçi Stories” covers the entire sweep of Hawaiian history.

MICHAEL LITTLE

“Folks You Meet in Longs”
By Lee Cataluna
Bamboo Ridge Press
Close your eyes and imagine that you are in the cultural center of these islands. What do you hear? Surf? Local music? Sounds of volleyball? Or maybe you hear the voices of folks you meet in Longs.
I’ve already bought a copy of “Folks You Meet in Longs,” by Advertiser columnist Lee Cataluna (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2005), to give for Christmas. Just haven’t decided who’s the lucky person to receive it. Could be a newcomer to the Islands. Could be someone who’s lived here forever and knows all the characters in the book, but hasn’t read it yet. “Folks You Meet in Longs” captures the voices of our local Hawaiçi culture better than anything I’ve read.
Cataluna’s short short stories, told by Longs shoppers and employees, is a modern classic. One definition of a classic is that it seems to have always been around. “Folks You Meet in Longs” has been around for only four years now, but I can’t imagine local literature without it. If I’m at the beach, or a Wahine volleyball game, I never wonder why I’m there, but I do sometimes find myself at Longs (Kaimukï Longs, mostly) wondering what I went there for, but trusting that I’m in the right place.
Novelist and short-story writer Michael Little’s “A Little Romance” brings his comic look at romance and modern life to our blogs.