In Western society of today, increasing demands are being put on the citizens to have good reading and writing skills to take part in various activities. This paper focuses what is meant by good reading skills in early school years. Texts are studied that are prominent in providing directives on how to understand and interpret this issue within a school framework. Selected texts are the curricula for the school subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language in early years as well as frameworks and assessment manuals for the international reading test, PIRLS. The results indicate a reduction of the concept of reading ability when going from the initial and wider sections of these texts to the specific formulations in the knowledge requirements in the curricula and test design of PIRLS. Based on the results, we discuss whether it is possible to speak of a single definition of good reading skills when the concept's content changes within a single document. It is also discussed on which grounds literacy skills are valued as more or less good, and what would be gained from a didactic perspective if literacy was talked about in other terms inspired by e.g. recent research in literacy.