”The best book in the world is quite simply the one you like the best” : a quantitative survey of men and women’s reading habits.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine adults’ fictionreading habits. The focus is finding out what differencesexist between men and women to study the significance offiction to readers. The study is based on a questionnairesurvey with men and women coming in to a public library.We used Sten Furhammar’s reading dimensions andcategories to describe the importance of the respondentsreading experience and describe the ways that men andwomen read.Our result shows that the genres men and women prefer arenovels, detective stories/thrillers and biographies. Thereading experience can be either personal or impersonal andthey can read either for experience or for instrumental use.The respondents read in different ways depending on bookgenre, content elements and where the reading takes place.We identify several functions of reading fiction; the mainthree reasons are to read for relaxation, entertainment and topass the time.Program: Bibliotekari