In our study of the out-of-school reading lives of 14 eighth graders who were avid readers of texts often marginalized in schools (romances, vampire stories, horror stories, dystopian novels, and fantasy), we strove to understand the nature and variety of reading pleasure. We found that our participants were remarkably articulate about why they read what they read. Here’s what they taught us.

Play Pleasure

One reason our participants read was to experience the pleasure of entering a story world. Karen explained: “I like to get away kind of when I read…I choose a lot of fantasy because it sparks your imagination and lets you go somewhere else.” We called this the pleasure of play, following John Dewey, who writes that play “puts itself forth with no thought of anything beyond.” Our participants so fully entered the world of the stories they read that the characters were almost real to them. As Rebecca explained, the characters “become like your friends. And you’re so much in their lives they’re like your best friends.” The pleasure of play is what readers experience when they become lost in a book.

Inner Work Pleasure

Play pleasure was important to our participants as an end in itself, but it also was a prerequisite for others kinds of pleasure. Perhaps our most striking finding is that our participants drew pleasure from using their reading to help them become the kind of people they wanted to become, a kind of pleasure we termed “inner work.” According to Jungian scholar Robert Johnson, “inner work is the effort by which we gain an awareness of the deeper layers of consciousness within us and move to an integration of the total self.” Helen’s comments about her reading reflect Johnson’s definition:

Well, I learn about myself through books when I imagine myself in the different situations. I’m pretty sure other people do that, too. And then I really can think about what would I really do. Would I run and hide or would I, you know, stand up and take it? And then you say well I like to think that I would stay, but maybe I really would run away and the next time you’ve got that fight or flight thing going on, you kinda think back to which one you want to be doing. You can sort of help yourself change in that way, and when you really admire a character in a book who’s really brave and stuff, you kind of can idolize them and become more like them. So it’s not really learning about yourself, it’s learning about what you could be.

Intellectual Pleasure

The pleasure of play and the pleasure of doing inner work were the most intense pleasures our readers experienced. But they weren’t the only pleasures. As Alex explained, reading also provided an intellectual pleasure: “[Reading’s] like being a detective almost. It’s taking the evidence and the information and everything that’s happened, taking all that and putting it together. Processing through it and seeing what ends connect, and then finding, once all those ends connect, what that last piece is.”