Books on the Folding Table.

Mary K. Greer's *Tarot for Yourself* is the workbook, sinner — the one that makes you sit down and *do* the readings, not just collect the decks. Exercises. Spreads. Journal prompts. By page 40 you'll know your significator and your year card and you'll have done your first real reading on yourself, which is a different kind of brutal than reading for somebody else. Keep it next to the deck. Pencil in the margins. Greer's been at this since the seventies. She knows.

Rachel Pollack — God rest her — wrote the book on the cards, my child. *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom* is the one. Card by card, suit by suit, written like a woman who actually believed the cards meant something and could prove it. It's thick. It takes a winter to read properly. *Madonn',* it's worth it. After this book you don't just *know* The Hierophant, sweet thing — you *recognize* him at the deli counter.

*Tarot Wisdom* is the one Rachel Pollack wrote thirty years after *Seventy-Eight Degrees,* my creature. Same cards. Different woman writing — older, more patient, more willing to sit with what she doesn't know. Read this after the first one. Read it slow. The book is heavy in the hand and that's appropriate. By the time you get to the suit of pentacles she's basically writing about how to live, and *Madonn'*, you're going to want to underline.

Steven Forrest writes about astrology the way a thoughtful priest writes about scripture — like the planets are characters with motives, not items on a horoscope app menu. *The Inner Sky* is the one I'd hand the niece who said *Aunt Sinderella, I think I want to do this for real.* She'll come back in a month with her chart printed out and three highlighters. Pilgrim, that's the goal. Tea on the table. Chart in the lap. We're cooking.

Woolfolk's book is the *reference* book, sweet thing — the big paperback that lives on the folding table where I can grab it during a reading without losing my place. Sun, moon, rising, every house, every aspect, every planet in every sign. Not poetry — utility. When somebody asks me *what does it mean that my Venus is in Scorpio,* I open this book to the page, hand it to them, and pour myself another glass. Saint Rita for everybody whose Venus is in Scorpio.

Skye Alexander wrote a tarot book for the niece who found the cards through *witch* before she found them through *fortune teller,* sinner. Spell-friendly, ritual-aware, easy to read on the couch with a cup of something. It's the gateway book — short chapters, real spreads, pictures of spreads laid out so you don't feel like a goddamn fool the first time you do one. Not academic. Not snobby. Saint Donna of the Long Island Iced Tea approves.

Anthony Louis wrote the doorstop, my child. *Llewellyn's Complete Book of Tarot* is a thousand pages of *everything* — history, every card, spreads from the simple to the unhinged, and a section on doing readings for other people that I'd make every beginner read twice. It's not a book you read in a weekend. It's a book that lives on the folding table and you crack it open in the middle of a reading when somebody pulls something weird. Worth every penny.