The Library at Guantanamo Bay

What do the prisoners read there, anyway? The Guardian illuminates us.

From the piece...

The 176 prisoners at the US facility have access to 18,000 books, magazines, DVDs and newspapers across 18 languages from their prison library, according to an investigation by Time magazine. The most popular titles among inmates are the Harry Potter books, novels by John Grisham and Agatha Christie, and Islamic texts. Prisoners are also keen to get their hands on photo-packed travel books, particularly ones featuring the ocean.

"I tell ya, Dan Brown's been beating me up lately," navy lieutenant Robert Collett told Time. "All his books are very popular, but we don't have all of them in Arabic." The International Committee of the Red Cross will sometimes help out when a particular translation can't be found, sending its staff to local stores to pick up copies because it believes that "access to books and news from the outside is very important to the prisoners' mental state".

Civil rights lawyer H Candace Gorman sent the library an Arabic edition of a Harry Potter book herself because it did not have all of the published titles and her client, the Libyan national Abdul al-Ghizzawi, was keen to keep up with the boy wizard's adventures. "The guards were telling him things that had happened in the book, but he didn't know if it was true or not," she told Time. Ghizzawi saw similarities between his own situation and that of the prisoners of Azkaban, and between George W Bush and Voldemort, she said.