The focus of this study was on investigating the reading attitudes, preferences ? and habits of first year Bahir Dar University students in the Faculty of ~ Humanities. The participants of this study were 165 first year students (115 males and 50 females) in the departments of Amharic, English, Journalism and Communication and Folklore. Questionnaires were employed for gathering data. To analyze the data, ~rcentage, t-test and ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) were utilized. Percentage was used to analyze the reading habits of students. so as to decide the reading preferences, the highest number of respondents in each . preferred reading material or topic wast~. T-test and ANOVA were employed to decide the signif.ikance of attitudinal cliff e'rence between sex and departmental groups respectiuelu, As a result, the study found out that the reading habits of the students is not encouraging. It was also investigated that though students often prefer to read academic related materials, magazines, newspapers, story · books, poems and research journals were pref erred next to those academic related materials in descending order. From the ten best reading topic preferences, 'Love Story' , 'Health' and 'Culture' were found to be the most pn!ferrecf reading topics by all departments. Adventure stories, Politics, Instructions, Religion and Environmental protection were also preferred by most departments as the ten best preferred reading topics. {Jesides these, the study shoiupd that the reading attitude of students is positive. It was also investigated that males' attitude was significantly better than thut of females' and English majors' attitude was found to be significantly better than Amharic and Folklore majors' .