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We didn’t do much shopping in Paris, not so much as a T-shirt, but we did stock up on reading matter.

The novels of James Salter are widely available in French translation, and are bestsellers in Paris. Of course: beautiful elegiac prose, lots of sex, several chapters and stories set in Paris.

The Search Warrant, a.k.a. Dora Bruder, was the only Modiano we found in English translation, but with his Nobel win we can expect more English translations in a few months.

We’d been looking for the fiction of Leonard Michaels since we heard one of the Nachman stories in the New Yorker podcast. Nachman, the protagonist, is a mathematician, bit of a loser, fascinating.

The Guest Cat had us at the title.

The Calasso is a social/literary history of Paris in Baudelaire’s day.

We want to read everything by the late Laurie Colwin. This one we read in a day: it’s about overthinkers who face the possibility of happiness and don’t know how to deal with it.

Ali Smith we’ve never read and are curious about.

We inspected the shelves at National Bookstore and were pleased at the new selections:

J.G. Ballard is best known for his memoir of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp Empire of the Sun. It is the least typical of his eerie dystopian tales. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Php1305.

This is column fodder: the story of the Igorots who were exhibited in New York in 1905. The American impresario got the idea from the St Louis Exposition of 1904, which showed 1300 tribespeople from the Philippines. The Lost Tribe of Coney Island, Php1095.

The Bone Clocks, one of our favorite books of the year, Php1199 in hardcover.

A short and elegant novel by Ian McEwan, about a female judge who must rule in the case of a teenage Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a blood transfusion that could save his life. In Saturday, McEwan got into his neurosurgeon protagonist’s head so thoroughly we were convinced he could operate; in The Children Act he explains British family law so cogently he could hear cases. Hardcover, Php999.

Gilt-edged like a Bible, The Book of Strange New Things is the latest from the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, and of the short story that became the film Under the Skin. Hardcover, Php1099.

A new collection of short stories from the author of Self-Help and Like Life. Trade, Php629.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 2010. Friends swear it is funny. Trade, Php375.