This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of students. Aside from ideas of familiarity and student preferences in reading, this article argues that text selection could also take into account text potentialities, as proposed by Louise Rosenblatt, from which three aspects are discernible; potentiality for participation, potentiality for a sustained reading experience, and potentiality for an enjoyable reading experience. These aspects of potentiality are illustrated and discussed through the literature classroom experiences of two Malaysian pre‐university English literature students. This article contends that ideas of text potentiality help us interpret students' responses to mandated texts and informs discussion among curriculum constructors and teachers about text selection in the literature classroom.