A really good (and blessedly quite short) book for beginners is
Statistics without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians by Derek Rowntree.
Also enlightening is How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff, although perhaps less essential for an introductory statistics course.
Both are published by Penguin Books.
Ideally, though, they should be read before the start of a course or, I suppose, reading them (although a pleasure, I think) might take up some of your available study time.