Though he’s long been well known and well regarded amongst the sort of folks who’d read a blog about food and cooking, Michael Pollan’s quickly becoming a household name. So far, his year’s started off pretty well, first with the publication of his latest book and this week with Food, Inc., a documentary in which he was heavily featured, being nominated for an Oscar. If you haven’t yet seen Food, Inc., it’s certainly worth an hour and a half of your time.

The book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is a surprisingly quick, compact read — I scrolled through the Kindle edition on my phone on a single morning bus ride (traffic was a bit more gnarly than usual that day, but you can read the whole thing cover to cover in an hour). It’s also a much different kind of book than Pollan’s other food books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Previously, Pollan has sought to explain why we eat the way we do, why the industrialized Western food system is the way it is and why that’s not necessarily the best thing for our health. Pollan has made such a reputation for himself as a food writer that it can be easy to forget that he’s a journalist — he teaches at UC Berkeley, in the school of journalism, after all. Explaining is what he does best.

Food Rules takes a different, much more prescriptive approach to the subject of the American diet, shying away from the question of why to answer the question of what we should eat. He starts with the premise that he rather academically explored in In Defense of Food, to “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” and then offers 64 ways to go about doing just that. There’s not a lot of scientific breakdown, not a lot of nutritional analysis, mostly time-tested, some would say common sense, advice on how to eat. Research involved talking to academics and scientists, but also cooks, anthropologists and other researchers who look at the history and the culture behind what we eat. The advice is casual, like something you might hear from your grandmother, instead of the rigid diatribes of whatever fad diet that’s currently sweeping the nation.

On balance, the book holds together very well. It’s short enough to be accessible, pithy enough to be memorable, specific enough to be helpful without being overbearing (one of the most important “rules” is that it’s ok to break the rules sometimes, as long as you let treats be treats). I would say that Pollan buries the lede a little bit, certainly from the perspective of this blog, as you have to get all the way to rule 63 for one of my favorites: cook.

Food lovers also tend to be drink lovers, which often means wine. I like a nice bottle as much as the next guy and do a decent job generally pairing the right kind of wine with most food but I’ve lately come to accept that I’ll never be a wine expert. I am, however, a great fan of beer in all its many forms, so I was quite excited to receive The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer as a gift from my future sister-in-law.

If your idea of beer is limited to the mass-marketed dreck that gets advertised at half-time or if you’ve never thought to consider beer as a high-class beverage worthy of pairing with the food you cook, this is certainly a book worth checking out. The authors, Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune (yes, they’re both women and they certainly know their beer better than most men I know) do the challenging work of introducing just what beer is, how it’s made and the incredible variety of craft beers that are possible from just four ingredients. They discuss nearly every style of ale and lager you’re likely to encounter, and even many you’ll have to seek out, with specific brands to try and tasting notes to look for. There’s further discussion on how to properly store and age your beers, proper glassware, a chapter on home brewing and a pretty extensive list of recipes for cooking with beer and how to pair types of beer with food.

My one complaint with the book is the style of writing, which I would best describe as flirtatious. The language is a bit too cute, the metaphors and puns a bit too often, with an undercurrent of, well, sexuality that wore thin pretty quickly. There were a few too many “sorry fellas, size matters” type jokes for me to take the writing seriously. I appreciate a certain amount of irreverence and conversational writing, particularly when the topic is something that I love, but Perozzi and Beaune were approaching desperation by the end.

The Naked Pint is a quick, fun and incredibly knowledgeable, if a bit syrupy sweet, read that will certainly help you have a better appreciation for beer and just might introduce a new tool to your culinary arsenal.