Barleywine
With Andy's book, I recommend you first go through all the cards and create your own journal with the main keywords for each card. Use a journal that is small enough that you can carry it around with you. Label 1-2 pages for each card. Keep your list simple: 2-3 nouns (emphasize 'near' meanings), 2 adjectives, 1-2 'far' meanings. Later you can add more keywords and sample pairs but for now, KEEP IT SIMPLE!
You might want to practice some card pairs - just to see if you get it. Go back over Andy's examples if you don't! Then three-card readings. (You can practice far meanings in short readings by using reversals to indicate 'far'.)
Fairly early on, I suggest laying out a Grand Tableau and read all the very near cards (the Square of 9 or portion thereof around your Significator) and all the far cards (the furtherest column away from the Significator). Ignore everything else. Summarize what just this much is saying.
At some point, I recommend a practice exercise that was used by Belgian author, Erna Droesbeke, that works *perfectly* with Andy's book. Lay out a Grand Tableau. Go through the whole thing, card by card in the numerical order of the cards (1-Rider, 2-Clover . . .). Read Andy's text for each card, and determine how it applies in your own Grand Tableau. It will take you several hours to go through the whole thing, but I can't think of a better way to familiarize yourself with how each card inter-relates with the others and how near/far works. BTW, this is not how most people actually read the GT (see Andy's book), but it's one of the best practice exercises I've ever tried and the card text in Andy's book works so well when doing it!
I'm about half-way through reading Andy's book now and it's in line with his many blog posts, his comments here and the material he contributed to the Gilded Reverie PDF document. He definitely keeps the card meanings pared down to their simplest terms and doesn't digress into debating whether the idiosyncracies of one system are any more valid than those of another. I'm not sure about its usefulness to the absolute beginner, though, since it doesn't do a lot of "hand-holding." My daughter expressed an interest in learning, so I bought her a copy of the Gilded Reverie that she loved so much when I read for her, and debated for a while which book to buy to go with it. I finally settled on Rana's book for now, since I also found it very approachable and not at all intimidating.
It's interesting that, when I first picked up Lenormand, I plunged right into the GT and the near/far method seemed very natural - "organic" might be a better word - as did the straightforward material in the Phillipe Lenormand sheet. I feel that I got a sensible grounding in what Lenormand is about, and Andy's book builds strongly on that basis.