First of all I have to start with the fact that I'm not from the USA or English speaking countries, and that I only read books from the library (I'm a student and I don't have the money or space to store new books, also ever since book depository closed I haven't found a replacement on that level).
Now to the point I enjoy fantasy, science fiction and thrillers (like wheel of time, Issac Asimov, and the Jack reacher books just to give an example) in fantasy I actually enjoy more old school fantasy like magician, wheel of time and similar.
As for science fiction or thrillers it's always a hit or miss with me sometimes I enjoy them and sometimes I just can't connect, and I can't exactly explain why.
Recently after reading almost all the books from the library sections that I always used to take books from (the fantasy and sci-fi is separate from everything else so imagine around 3 shelves, this is all the fantasy and sci-fi books in the Library, not a small amount and I'm thankful for it but it's around 300 books maybe in total) I started taking books from adjacent genres, for the past few years the genres I like have been on a decline and less and less of them are getting translated, as the focus shifted to smut and romance and all romance varieties, and the girls love it, but it leaves most guys like me to look for new things.
So I started taking books from the fantasy romance sections, a few examples from recently are "tsumiko and the enslaved fox" and "written in red" by Ann Bishop (important to mention both those books were only translated last year, so you can guess that many currently popular series in English might not be available for me) anyway when I read tsumiko I both liked and didn't like it, like the story could have been more interesting but it was way too orientated toward female demographics and just didn't click with me, but now for the surprising part I'm still currently reading "written in red" and everytime I have to put down the book I'm thinking about the next time I'll continue, it's not the same feeling I get from regular fantasy but something different that I don't quite know how to describe.
Also to make some sense of what genres I've read I like to think of it chronologically:
As a kid (until around 10-11) I read all the books in the kids and pre-teen section, and I mean literally anything there, I used to read 7 books a week back then (thinking back about it feels me with nostalgia), then I started reading all the teen books (from around 12-16) and here I read what was mostly available which was almost always a female MC in some setting (school or whatever) with love triangle and action, those books too were more oriented towards girls but at that I both didn't know other books existed, like I thought this was generally how teen books are (some examples are evermore, Cassandra Clare, Sarah j Maas, and more) and then from 16 up to today I started to find my niche in fantasy, sci-fi and thrillers.
So to sum it all up I'm looking for new genres that I might actually like, I think I rambled a lot here but I didn't know what could be helpful so I included everything I deemed important, please ask questions if something is not clear
by Marvellover13