The purpose of this thesis is to examine adults’ fiction reading habits. The focus is finding out what differences exist between men and women to study the significance of fiction to readers. The study is based on a questionnaire survey with men and women coming in to a public library. We used Sten Furhammar’s reading dimensions and categories to describe the importance of the respondents reading experience and describe the ways that men and women read. Our result shows that the genres men and women prefer are novels, detective stories/thrillers and biographies. The reading experience can be either personal or impersonal and they can read either for experience or for instrumental use. The respondents read in different ways depending on book genre, content elements and where the reading takes place. We identify several functions of reading fiction; the main three reasons are to read for relaxation, entertainment and to pass the time.