That could definitely be it Grizabella. I am really bad at sitting with cards without reaching for a book. I love to read up on a card before I give my take on it. Even though I tell myself that I won't this time, I often find myself that I can't help it. I should probably stick with one card readings at this time because when I find myself doing 3 card readings that's when I go for the book together. I still haven't developed a practice of putting tarot cards together.
Bless your heart!
I was the same way for the very longest time. It's such a huge leap to learn to just sit with the cards till I could figure out what they were saying without a book. There were two things that actually caused me to think I'd just never "get it" with reading cards.
First, being convinced I couldn't figure out the meaning of a spread without a book. And that was complicated even further by the fact that a lot of the time, just going to a book, the written meaning still didn't fit. It took me a long time to be able to figure out what the cards meant in context and what that meant in the actual meaning in a spread. How to make the answer fit with the question.
The second was knowing the card meanings but not being able to convey the meanings in a spoken way. I knew what the cards were telling me, but I couldn't easily turn it into the spoken form. I figured out it's because we deal with images in the right side of the brain and with facts in the left side. (I'm sure that's over-simplified but it worked for me.) It took awhile for me to learn how to take the information from the images and shift them to the other side of my brain to express them in words. Using the two sides of the brain at the same time isn't the easiest thing to do. It wasn't for me, anyway but just doing it helped me develop the ability.
The way I overcame these things was just self-discipline. I made myself not pick up a book while I was reading the cards. I could only use books in times when I wasn't reading the cards. Sometimes I just had to leave a reading not knowing what one card meant or sometimes even more than one, but it helped me to develop confidence in trusting my own readings without the book. And instead of thinking I had to read the cards right away when looking at a spread, I learned that it's okay to sit with it awhile until I could make the puzzle pieces all fit.
