DISCOVERIES

Hungry for Paris

The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants

Alexander Lobrano

Random House: 464 pp., $16 paper

LIFE is too short to choose the wrong restaurant in Paris, so one needs help. There is too little overlap among Paris restaurant guides; in New York, for example, there are always a handful of restaurants everyone’s talking about. Then there are the ones your grandmother might have taken you to on special occasions, like Cafe des Artistes -- those never go away, generation after generation. “Hungry for Paris” is not that kind of guide, but it offers something else, “a portrait of Paris seen through the prism of the city’s best food.” Organized by neighborhood and interspersed with delightful sections on such matters as eating alone, the Parisian obsession with North African food and the author’s first experience of true grandeur (at Le Train Bleu), this is the sort of guide you read before you go to Paris -- to get in the mood and pick up a few tips, a little style. Alexander Lobrano tells you what to expect and how to act (don’t bring small, ill-behaved children, don’t ask for less garlic or no salt; fizzy water or cocktails may raise eyebrows). A word of warning: Unless you’re a truly Ugly American, fear of the French (especially French waiters!) has wrecked more than one visit. It’s a beautiful city. The food is fantastic. Enjoy.

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The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

And Other Small Acts of Liberation

Elizabeth Berg

Random House: 256 pp., $23

“Ibegan at Dunkin’ Donuts. I hadn’t gone there since I started Weight Watchers a year ago.” So opens the title story, record of a fabulous binge. And boy, are we rooting for this narrator. We don’t want her story, or any of the stories in this collection, to end in pain or self-loathing. (“I thought there was a delicacy to the way I licked the chocolate off my fingers. I thought it was beautiful. I wished someone could see.”) We want Agnes, in “Returns and Exchanges,” to break free of self-judgment: “She weighed 176 pounds and her socks didn’t match, and she was going out with the man who really loved her.” In “Truth or Dare,” a group of women recall their exes; their friendship is a fulcrum, “a point of support . . . an agent through which vital powers are exercised.” In “Sin City,” Rita, 67, “has been living a half-a-banana life. Half a banana, half a muffin, half portions at restaurants, half-price movies that she goes to in the daytime.”

The small victories here are victories over the despair women are said to feel after 50: despair over their bodies, their losses, their loneliness. “Enough is enough,” Rita thinks. “She is far too young to be living like this. . . . She’s going to start spending her children’s inheritance. She’s going to buy wild salmon and jumbo cashews and Vosges chocolates and she’s going to travel -- alone, thank you.”

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Changing Clothes in China

Fashion, History, Nation

Antonia Finnane

Columbia University Press: 378 pp., $35

THE silks! The colors! The dark, homespun, cotton jackets! Dragon robes and Mao suits! Antonia Finnane documents the changes in fashion over the last century in China. Politics, culture, the Manchu and Han influences, the birth of the modern woman. The photographs, pen and ink drawings, fashion brochures and paintings that accompany the text are gorgeous and inspiring. The words “fashion” and “China” “may seem incongruent, particularly when used in an historical context,” Finnane writes. She takes careful note of the influence of other cultures on Chinese fashion -- but it is clear from these pages how frequently the world of fashion has turned to China for inspiration.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com