The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who nominated themselves as passionate readers of a kind of text that their parents and teachers tended to disapprove of. The students spanned a range of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, school achievement, and were split between boys and girls. The authors then coded each content unit as to which of the four kinds of pleasure (play, intellectual, social, and work) was evidenced. The authors' informants gravitated toward books that challenged the students both to be better readers and to be better or more whole people, books that assisted them to outgrow themselves, that helped them consider new perspectives and see new possibilities in themselves and the world, that helped them to do functional work, to socialize and to identify themselves. The authors' informants read for pleasure, but of kinds that go well beyond conventional thinking. The authors' informants drew a hard line between school reading and "real reading" (to quote [student,] Callie). School reading was reading you had to do. Real reading was reading that helped you on your life's journey, that immersed you in all four of the pleasures described here.