Drawing on six years of student focus groups and classroom observations across Victorian secondary schools, this practitioner-research piece captures something rarely documented: what disengagement in reading actually feels like from the inside. Students across diverse school settings describe English reading as formulaic, teacher-directed and disconnected from the genuine pleasure they experience reading at home. Common practices — chapter summaries, TEEL essays, prescribed questions — are shown to suppress rather than stimulate interpretive thinking. The authors argue that reading is an imaginative act, and that school structures have largely stripped it of that quality. The paper is notable for centring student voice so vividly, and for locating the problem not in student reluctance but in instructional design. Particularly resonant for Years 7–9 English teachers looking to understand why capable readers disengage at secondary school.