100 books like Tarot for Troubled Times

This was the first book that ever taught people not only how to read for themselves, but also how to use the cards to attain personal insight. It will teach you how to develop a deep relationship with the cards, and it shows you how to use the cards for greater self-knowledge. Every book on this subject since has Mary K. Greer to thank. When I first came across it, it changed the way I read forever. And it gave me new tools to use the cards for my own.

This is a very recent book that I love for its deceptive simplicity. The explanations are easy, the language is conversational, and each card is described in contemporary terms so that you’ll recognize yourself or people you know on every page. And for each card, there are a series of questions and journal prompts that on the surface seem simple, but that takes you on a deep inner journey. The subtitle of this book is “Know the cards to know yourself” and it’s a promise this book will help you keep.  

There is no personal growth or spiritual development without encountering and coming to terms with one’s shadow. It can be a frightening prospect, and it’s not a very comfortable process, but there is no getting around it. That’s why this book is important. When you confront your shadow, it helps to have a guide who has been there and done it. Steel has done the work and knows how to help you do it too. I am very grateful for this book—it helped me face inner conflicts and accept things about myself I always thought were unacceptable. It’s not an easy practice, but the results are profound. 

Jessica Dore’s book is a revelation.

Coming from a psychological view of the cards, Dore incorporates ideas from different psychological schools of thought such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as well as Greek myth, Arthurian legend, folklore, fairy tales, and more.

Dore offers a unique, modern, and very personal approach to the cards and their meanings. A fascinating example for anyone building their own tarot practice and figuring out what tarot means to them on a personal and individual level.

When I was first learning to read Tarot, one of my big challenges was understanding how the cards worked together.

I eventually came up with my own method. But if I’d had this book when I was starting out, I would have figured things out much more quickly. 

Diane Wing goes into all the basics of Tarot reading, including some of the more metaphysical elements. But this book’s strength is the extensive Tarot combinations section.

If understanding how the cards fit together is something you’re struggling with, this is your book.

Poetry is supposed to be difficult, right? The erudite poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Yeats, and Dickinson blend insight, psychology, philosophy, wisdom, meter, and magic sauce into a puzzle to suss out. Eliot is like that most of the time, but not in this book, where he is so direct, plain and simple, amazed and amazing, that I am not once tempted to apply critical theory.

If there is a possibility of divine inspiration, this has always felt like Exhibit 1 to me. Every time I think I might have to figure out what he’s saying, he says, “Don’t bother,” by taking me into a picture that is so concrete and full of the everyday that it paradoxically shines the divine out at me. This book can be opened anywhere, started anywhere, and it will bring me comfort and joy. 

This is a Tarot how-to book with a difference: It organizes the cards by theme, making it way easier to understand and remember their meanings compared to the usual memorize-them-one-at-a-time approach. The book is really a Tarot course in 22 lessons (it’s no coincidence that there are 22 Major Arcana cards in a Tarot deck!). Tarot 101 is an excellent resource for demystifying the Tarot and breaking it down into manageable chunks that make sense and that you can remember and use for the long term.

It’s said that court cards can be the trickiest for Tarot readers to interpret. This was certainly true for me when I was starting out, so Understanding the Tarot Court became invaluable to me. 

Mary K. Greer is another Tarot classicist and has spent decades delving into the history and usage of Tarot. The book goes deep into the symbolism and meanings of various cards—both upright and reversed—even going so far as to equate them to Myers-Briggs personality types.

Perhaps more importantly, it also has excellent explanations of how to read these quirky cards. 

This is probably the least-known and most surprising book ever written about Tarot. And yes, the author was pop culture icon Timothy Leary—Harvard psychologist turned apostle of psychedelic experimentation. I discovered this book more than a decade after it was published in 1979 and was amazed to realize it had come out just a year after Volume One of Kaplan’s meticulous Encyclopedia of Tarot. It’s impossible to imagine two more different authors or two more different books!  

It’s equally impossible to explain what Leary’s 288-page, large-format book is ”about” since it was deliberately composed as a mix of ideas, themes, and graphic illustrations that would challenge our normal expectations of intellectual order. However, you can get a flavor of Leary’s approach from this chapter title:  “Tower portrays your self-actualized brain-control-reality-director neuro-technology.”

Opening this book, I revisit a time when the “counter-culture” movement surfaced wildly exploratory questions, and Tarot was being… show more.

When I started a serious study of Tarot, there were very few substantive books on the topic—and barely anything had been written about the history and scope of Tarot art. But, that changed dramatically when collector and publisher Stuart Kaplan began the Encyclopedia of Tarot; over the years between 1978 and 2005, the series grew to four volumes and 1,584 pages, documenting every Tarot deck he could find out about.

However, the first volume stands alone as a turning point in the modern history of Tarot. In almost 400 oversized pages, it discusses artifacts that range from 15th-century museum pieces to esoteric decks designed by 19th-century enthusiasts to hand-made creations of adventurous 20th-century artists. Most of the book’s pages display black-and-white photographs of cards from various decks, but there are also scholarly essays illuminating the many aspects of Tarot history and art.

Kaplan’s Encyclopedia encouraged me to take Tarot seriously,… show more.