David Remes, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees, told me one client requested romance novels, while others have asked for skiing, surfing and mountain-climbing magazines, “because they never see nature.” His client Shaker Aamer, a former resident of Britain, took a liking to George Orwell. “I sent him a copy of ‘1984,’ and he said he read it about three times and that it perfectly captured the psychological reality of being at Gitmo,” Remes said.

Books are screened out if they include too much profanity, anti-American or extremist themes, or “too much sex and violence,” Milton said. Still, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” made it through the filter.

After a recent visit to the library, several reporters posted snapshots of some of the books at gitmobooks.tumblr.com, and some readers said they found the photo collection oddly engrossing. Derek Attig wrote on his blog, Bookmobility, that as he scrolled through photographs of the Narnia novels and “300 Orchids: Species, Hybrids and Varieties in Cultivation,” he was “struck by the intense familiarity of these shelves that I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, used by people that I do not know or, by design, know much about.”