In this thesis Ytre-Arne explores women's magazine reading as a media experience. She asks how regular readers of women's magazines experience these publications, and how these experiences can be related to readers’ everyday lives and to their sense of identity. In order to answer these questions I have conducted a qualitative questionnaire and interview study of a group of regular women's magazine readers. The reader study constitutes the central empirical component of my research, but it has been supplemented with textual analysis and interviews with magazine editors. In the thesis, the analysis of this empirical material is presented in the form of four scholarly articles. Each article emphasizes different dimensions of women's magazine reading as a media experience, each draws on different theoretical perspectives, and each can be related to different debates in the field of media studies. A central ambition of the thesis is to suggest and demonstrate analytical approaches that are new to research on women's magazines. In addition to drawing on established methods in qualitative audience research Ytre-Arne will also propose a new methodological approach for exploration of the relationship between specific practices of reading and specific textual features. While she situates her research in relation to important debates within women's magazines research, she also introduces and applies theoretical perspectives that are new to this field, inspired by phenomenology, sociological identity theory and public sphere theory. Throughout the thesis, women's magazine reading is conceptualized as a multifaceted media experience that encompasses perceptual, aesthetic, technological, cognitive, emotional, social and cultural dimensions. Regular readers value women’s magazine reading as a relaxing ritual that holds a specific place in the structure of everyday life, and they appreciate the properties of the print magazine medium as particularly suited to such reading rituals. However, readers also engage in critical evaluations of women's magazine texts. Sometimes women's magazines fail to live up to readers’ expectations, but mainly regular readers experience women's magazines as relevant – to their everyday lives and to their conceptions about their own lives. Furthermore, these experiences are relevant to society in a broader sense, as women's magazine reading can be understood as one of several possible resources for relating one’s personal life to a greater social and cultural community.