Subway reading in Barcelona

Just to get things started, here's a bit of "what I did over the summer"--in Barcelona, Spain (go if you ever get a chance), I was stunned to see this vending machine on a subway platform.

What does it say about Spain--or the U.S., for that matter? Note: no bodice-rippers these. The glare (and photo size) make the titles almost impossible to read, but trust me, they include 4 novels by Mario Vargas Llosa and several by 1998 Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. I think there were some philosophical works in there as well. Perhaps Vargas Llosa, read here in college classrooms and coffeehouses, is actually a popular author over there. (Do they think of Tom Clancy or Dan Brown as "foreign literature"?) Or perhaps it really just shows how anti-intellectual we are over here.

On a related note, I heard on the radio recently that three of the top five books most requested by prisoners in Guantanamo were the Koran, The Da Vinci Code, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.