When two people read the same book, they might both end up liking it very much. However, this does not necessarily mean that their reading experiences were identical. We therefore ask what factors contribute to “liking” a story, and how people vary in this respect. We found that readers like stories because they find them interesting, emotional, amusing, suspenseful and/or beautiful. When looking at individual differences, we found five different clusters of readers in whom story liking was differentially associated with these dimensions of experience. Interestingly, differences between groups of readers were not associated with expertise, a characteristic strongly associated with aesthetic appreciation of visual art. Our work illustrates that it is important to take into consideration the fact that individuals differ in their appreciation of literary narratives, and that it is possible to quantify these differences in empirical experiments. Our work suggests that future research should be careful about “overfitting” theories of aesthetic appreciation to an “idealized reader”, but rather take into consideration variations in reading experiences.