This article explores how four male vehicle engineering students at an upper secondary school in Sweden engage in literature discussion. The study combines a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach with a reception theory perspective and shows that the boys use direct reported speech (DRS) in their interaction as a technique to handle intimate and personal dimensions in the text, but also to construct themselves as skilled readers. Approaching the empirical data in this way makes it possible to go beyond the stereotyped images of (working class) boys presented in so many research papers and provide a more nuanced picture of boys' reception pattern in a school context.