Learning the Tarot: A Tarot Book for Beginners

The book almost every experienced reader hands to a beginner. Joan Bunning does not give you a deck and a glossary, she gives you a course.

Why Start Here

Most tarot books for beginners are really reference lists: 78 entries, a paragraph each, and an unspoken assumption that you will somehow assemble them into a reading. Learning the Tarot works the other way around. It is built as nineteen self-paced lessons that begin with a single card and add one skill at a time, so by the time you are laying out a full spread you have already practiced every piece of it. That structure is why the book has lasted since 1998 and why it keeps getting recommended long after flashier titles come and go.

It also teaches on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the imagery that the overwhelming majority of tarot books and decks are based on. That matters more than it sounds: skills you build here carry directly into whatever you read or buy next, instead of stranding you in one author’s private system. Bunning is calm and practical throughout, more interested in getting you reading confidently than in mysticism, which makes the book easy to trust whether you approach tarot as a spiritual practice or simply as a thinking tool.

What to Expect

At 320 pages this is a working textbook, not a weekend read, and it rewards being used rather than skimmed. Expect to keep a deck beside you and actually do the exercises, because the lessons build on each other. Bunning covers card meanings, several spreads, and the harder skill most books skip entirely: how cards modify one another once they share a reading. Work through it at your own pace and you come out able to sit down with any deck and give a coherent reading, which is exactly what a first tarot book should deliver.