Looking for book recommendations tends to proceed based on genre, but that works less well for me than for many other people. Let me explain.
Although I do tend to prefer realistic, contemporary settings over past or future ones and fantasy ones, I don’t necessarily tend to seek out stories about people who resemble me. I see reading fiction as an exercise in empathy: I want to put myself aside and immerse myself in the life of another person. In other words, I ideally don't want to be me while I'm reading, reflecting on the narrative at arm's length; I want to be right in the point-of-view character's head, feeling whatever he or she is feeling. So I tend to like writers who make it easy to do that.
I’m not particularly picky about what a book is “about,” though, as long as it has a compelling point of view character with an interesting story. There are certain recurring aspects of many of the stories I’ve liked best: strong women, queer characters, people with difficult jobs, conflicts between people of different social classes, people figuring out who they are, "misfit" types learning to navigate a world they don't quite fit into, and people dealing with hard relationships, but a story doesn’t require any of those elements to be interesting to me. I care more about the shape of the narrative than its content: I want the story to tell about an important time in the characters' lives, and I want them to grow and change as a result.
As for the craft itself, while I'm not drawn to self-consciously beautiful language, clumsy writing makes me want to throw the book at the wall. Mostly I just want each character to sound like a real person, both in terms of real-sounding dialogue and in terms of an internal narrative that really sounds like sort of thing that each individual character would think (rather than words chosen because the author thinks they’re pretty or funny).
Please recommend novels to me that you think I'd like! I read in English, Dutch, and German.
by TheTiniestLizard