We all know that people have been stocking up on groceries, but there hasn’t been as much news about stocking up on books. But that’s just what happened in late March: book sales jumped (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52048582 and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/book-sales-surge-self-isolating-readers-bucket-list-novels). Lots of people are catching up on the reading that they’d been meaning to get around to.
So what are we to do in PPLS? The main library might be locked up, but our e-resources are still available. There are hundreds of books available in each of our disciplines. All we need to do is get some coffee and click on the titles that sound interesting. But that raises another question: what to choose?
I’ve tried to help you answer that question. I went digging through all the PPLS reading lists on Leganto for books that have been assigned in our courses. Then, I checked each title in DiscoverEd to see if electronic copies were available, and assembled the results in three large spreadsheets. You can access these spreadsheets as PDFs by visiting our Learning Resources site (https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/PPLSLearningResources) and choosing either “DiscoverEd lists” from the top menu or “Learning more about your field” from the panels in the centre. Browse through the titles and see if anything jumps out. There might be a book that was recommended in one of your earlier courses that you never got around to reading. You could also try looking ahead to topics you’re thinking about taking in future semesters. Or what about exploring another part of PPLS? I’m in Linguistics, but I can see that there are three titles on “Sentence Comprehension” just waiting for me in Psychology.
Not all of us have time on our hands right now, of course, but many of those who do have a lot of it. If you’re in the latter category, I hope you’ll have a look.