This research investigates effects which text characteristics have on reading in English. The text characteristics consisted of three variables, (1) text topic, (2) text type, (3) text difficulty. In this experiment, text topic had two levels: one dealing with non-daily life and another dealing with daily life. Text type also had two levels: expository type and narrative type. Text difficulty had two levels: low and high. Texts used in this research were chosen from among textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Science and Education. Vocabulary and grammar of each text were modified to control the total number of words and difficulty of each text at the same level. The subjects were 62 senior high school students. They were asked to answer twenty questions of each text, which consisted of 10 factual questions and 10 inferential questions. Subjects answered those questions in Japanese. The obtained data was analyzed using 2-way ANOVA, in which the independent variables were text topic, text type, and text difficulty and the dependent variable was reading score. The major finding was that there were actual effects of text difficulty on reading in both the expository text and the narrative text dealing with daily life. As a result, it was mainly argued that the difference in text topic and text structure might be related with this result.