Have you dreamed about recording a parent’s story? Or about writing your family’s history, and the path it took over the decades – now, while your grandparents can still tell you what they know? How about documenting the history of a company you built up from nothing, or recording the life of a long-beloved family home?

This is where a personal historian comes in.

I could read about writing, sometimes instead of sitting down and actually writing, until the cows come home. (“What cows?” asked my then-four-year-old with a puzzled look, once, when I used that expression.)

Except a living man there is nothing
more wonderful than a book!
A message to us from the dead,
- from human souls whom we never saw,
who lived perhaps thousands of miles away;
and yet these, on those little sheets of paper,
speak to us, teach us, comfort us,
open their hearts to us as brothers.
-  Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

Darien Gee is a Big Island writing dynamo, and acquaintance, whose new novel Friendship Bread (Ballantine Books/Random House) comes out April 5, 2011.

“A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man’s history.”

A poem about books and time.

Steve Grogan is going to be here, on the Big Island and O‘ahu, signing books, and you should swing by. I’m going to stop by when he’s at Basically Books in Hilo on Saturday. He is an interesting guy and you should stop by, say hello and pick up a book, which he’ll sign for you.

My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel. – Edward Abbey

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than
have been presented in the entire history of television.  - Andrew Ross

“I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.” – Ray Bradbury