Yeah... Gregory had it in one. (Thanks G).
Picking favorites is a tricky proposition for me with any books. It's totally contextual... depends on mood and topic and focus of the moment. The right book on the right subject at the right moment when you're in the right frame of mind. That stuff makes it impossible for me to spit out "top ten" lists (as I mentioned in the longer rant above). Ton ten lists are a byproduct of lazy consumer culture: people wanting other people to do "coverage" so they can skip through the oceans of twaddle to find somehting with content.
Let me put it another way: I have a library of about 17K books. Of those probably about a thousand are related to general divination or topics in some way tangential to Tarot. Of those, maybe four or five hundred are specifically Tarot related. Out of those 400-500, I'd say 2/3s were one-off reads that Iread to grok and will likely only use as a reference if somoene asks a question or if I'm trying to answer something specific to that book. Of the remainign 100+ I recommend books based on people's specific needs as I understand them. I don't believe in "ONE" book any more than I believe in "ONE" meal or ONE movie or "ONE" truth. And of course every time a new book is published and I absorb it, the whole list shifts again.
It's one of the reasons I don't like to make blind recommendations because they tend to be subjective and kind of meaningless. Mainly that''s cause I'm a freak about book recommendations, and tend to treat them like dangerous prescriptions. And there are books I remember finding widly useful way back when which I think are mushy and pointless now. But that's me and that's now, so it all depends on where you are in the journey. I can think of 2 that were great, seemed stupid, and then were revelatory again at a later date when I got my head out of my ass.
So Daphne, I'm sorry to say I don't really have "ultimate favorites." On certain topics there are go to books I recommend but that's a sliding scale. For people nervous about the hardcore Thoth Tarot I send them to DuQuette's primer. But not everyone... some folks gets pissed that he's chatty and jokey about somehting they find deadly serious. For people dipping their toes into tarditional astrology I often suggest Frawley's
Real Astrology, but a lot of working astrologers find his (justified) venom grating and want to skip to later books of his that are more practical. Some people want hardcore Golden Dawn theory, and Wang's
Qabalistic Tarot takes a firm line, but it also leaves a lot of gaps and it's a little myopic UNLESS you're only doing the full-on GD QBLH thing.
Again, if there's somehting you're looking for specifically, I love recommending titles, but to be truly picky I have to know what I'm picking for.